From busy leader to selective leader
How to trade good-intentions for strategic leverage, decide which fires to fight and which to let teach someone else
There was a time I believed leadership meant fixing everything that broke. If something was on fire, I grabbed the hose. If a decision stalled, I stepped in. It felt like duty. It felt like value.
It also made me the bottleneck.
The hard lesson wasn’t that problems should be ignored. It was that every instant fix buys calm now and costs capacity later.
The more you sweep up crumbs for everyone, the less room there is for others to learn how to sweep.
Leadership, at scale, is less about doing and more about choosing which fires to fight.
Here’s the lens I now use - quietly, repeatedly, when the instinct to jump in appears. It’s practical, second-order by habit (not by name), and designed to protect the one scarce resource leaders actually have: Attention.
The three linked questions (use them like a scalpel)
Before you step into a situation, answer these in your head - fast, not ceremonially.
Who will be affected downstream?
Don’t stop at the immediate fix. Ask: what behaviour or reliance does my intervention create? If my involvement makes people default to me next time, that’s centralised risk.Can we reverse it cheaply?
Some fixes are experiments; others are hammers that reshape the landscape. If reversing the decision later imposes political or psychological costs, you’ve raised the stakes and the need for your involvement.Does my presence create lasting leverage?
Will choosing to act now build capability or norms that persist? Or will it only deliver a one-off outcome that disappears once you’re gone?
If the chain of answers points to dependency, political fallout, or negligible capability gain: step back.
What this looks like in real work
Second-order thinking sounds lofty until you see it in a sprint planning room, an HR inbox, or at 2 a.m. on an incident call. Here are concrete replays.
Product trade-off
The reflex: jump into sprint planning to prioritise a bug. The ship sails faster.
The second-order result: the team routes future trade-offs to you because “you decide.” The PM never learns impact-driven prioritisation.
The better move: coach the PM to quantify user and business impact, ask them to draft comms, and let them own the execution. You retain roadmap responsibility; they gain judgement.
People incident
The reflex: step in to resolve a heated dispute and make peace. Immediate calm; gratitude.
The second-order result: the manager doesn’t develop mediation skills; similar issues resurface.
The better move: require the manager to lead mediation, then run a retro with you facilitating the lessons. The manager grows; the team’s norms strengthen.
Operational failure
The reflex: patch the outage personally and restore service. Relief all around.
The second-order result: no postmortem; the same failure mode recurs.
The better move: patch plus mandatory postmortem, updated runbooks, and a guardrail. The team owns reliability and the recurrence rate drops.
Practical moves you can implement today
You don’t need more philosophy; you need tools that make second-order thinking routine.
Make escalation rules explicit. Publish a one-page guide: what teams resolve, what managers handle, what reaches the director and why. Require a single field on every escalation: “Second-order consequence if leader intervenes.”
Use a short teach-back prompt. When someone asks you to decide, say: “Explain this as if I won’t be here next week.” If they can’t, coach; don’t solve.
Adopt a reversibility checklist. Before you sign off, ask: can we toggle this off? Can we compensate affected parties cheaply? Will this create permanent structural change? If reversal costs are high, lean in; if low, delegate.
Score decisions quickly. Three quick scores (0–3 each): downstream impact, reversibility risk, and leverage. Totals guide action: low = delegate; medium = coach + monitor; high = lead.
Timebox leader decisions. If a decision can be made by the team in under an hour, let them decide. If it will affect quarters or cross-teams, it should be elevated.
Require teach-backs after execution. When someone runs an experiment or handles an escalation, have them write a one-paragraph teach-back. Publicise it briefly in the team; reward the learning.
Micro-habits that change behaviour
Big practices start with small habits.
Start meetings with: “What do we want to achieve if I leave now?”
Keep a monthly list: “Problems I solved that should’ve been owned.” Review it in your 1:1s.
When tempted to rescue, use one of three reframes: “Run it as an experiment - How will we measure success?”, “Teach me your plan if I were gone two weeks”, “What capability does the team gain if they run this?”
These tiny rituals create cultural friction against rescue behaviour and make delegation a default, not an exception.
Signals that tell you you’re improving
You can measure the change:
Escalation rate to leader (trend down = good).
Postmortem completion after incidents (should approach 100%).
Repeat escalations from the same manager/team (trend down).
Team autonomy score from a quarterly pulse (trend up).
Quality of teach-backs: are they actionable and short, or vague and defensive?
Track two or three of these and review them monthly. Data reduces the moral drama around stepping back.
Common traps (so you don’t stumble)
Rescue bias. Fixing things makes us feel useful. That feeling is addictive. Notice it and ask whether your fix grows capability or dependency.
False urgency. Heat does not always equal priority. Ask whether this requires immediate leader oxygen.
Perfection paralysis. Delegation flops when leaders demand flawless execution. Expect iteration; prioritize learning.
A short test you can use now
If someone asks you to decide, run this in your head - fast:
Will my involvement change how people behave after this is over?
Can this be safely reversed without political costs?
Will my involvement create a capability that persists?
If you can’t answer “yes, it creates capability” to at least one of these, ask the team to run it and teach back.
Leadership isn’t an endurance contest for busyness. It’s a pattern of choices about where to place your attention and authority so the organisation grows independent of your constant presence. Fight the battles that reshape the map, not the ones that merely tidy the moment.
Don’t aim to be everywhere. Aim to be where your presence multiplies others’ judgement. Choose the campaigns that matter.
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Until next post,
Sanghamitra