The Recyclable Leader

Continuing on the theme of leadership -- would you say you're disposable?

Ross Young over at CISO Tradecraft has a good post out on how you should envision your leadership role in terms of becoming disposable. His key line: "The most effective leaders aren’t the smartest people in the room; they are the architects of systems that thrive in their absence."

As a CISO, or generally as the leader of a technical function, you will work amongst many very smart people. An easy question for you to answer incorrectly is: why am I a leader, while they are not leaders? So many bad or wrong (or alarming) answers might come to mind for you, such as: I'm the most senior employee; I've done all the jobs here; I'm the highest performing employee; I wanted the leadership job more than they did; etc. It's unlikely you'll think to yourself that you were the most politically savvy. I can report that I personally know people who thought of themselves as 'saviors' of the function they now lead, and I also know of another person who applied for higher-level leadership jobs but ended up in a lower-level leadership job -- and let everyone know it.

Let's dial back the messianic drama and get to the likely reasons why you're the leader: you are more strategically minded, may be more likely to anticipate what your bosses need from you, and are able at least to make it look like you get along with others.

In short, you became a leader because you're disposable.

Ross notes that you are better off being disposable as a leader than being that person without whom the organization couldn't function -- though we will come back to that. Here is exactly what he says on the topic:

"The ultimate benchmark of leadership isn’t what happens while you are in the office, but what happens when you leave. If your presence is required for the engine to hum, you are a bottleneck, not a builder. Great leadership is measured by the silence of your phone while you’re on vacation.

If you walked away for three weeks today, would your organization thrive, or would it prove that you only have a lifestyle, not a legacy? If the answer is the latter, it is time to start getting dumber and empowering your team to take the lead."

In summary, being a leader isn't about you, it's about the processes your team develops and how they execute them. To borrow the management guru speak from the 1980s/1990s, you need to become a clock builder, not a time-teller.

This is good advice from a behavioral science perspective. For many leaders, becoming disposable is going to be a stretch -- and they should make the effort. We endorse becoming 'disposable' for any leader.

But let's look at it more expansively. We recommend that you don't make yourself disposable, but instead you work to become recyclable. Your true value as a leader is in your enhanced value creation within the organization. Tactically that comes in terms of being disposable. Strategically, when you create value within the organization, others will look for ways to get you to contribute through new challenges. 

By becoming a disposable leader, you're enabling your technical function and raising the skill levels of your team. By becoming a recyclable leader, you're creating value throughout the organization at multiple levels.

Ask us how you can become recyclable.

(image credit: By Cecilemckee - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=145888204)