6 min read · The Pillars I Stand On
I was forty years old and two years into being a project manager when something happened that stayed with me for a six-hour drive home.
The moment happened at a Christmas party.
A peer of mine had just learned he was losing two of his top assistants. They weren’t quitting. They weren’t leaving the company. They were being promoted. Moving up. Taking the next step in their careers. The kind of thing most leaders claim they want for the people who work for them.
He wasn’t celebrating.
For most of the evening he complained about it. The timing was terrible. The workload was going to fall back on him. He didn’t know how he was supposed to absorb the additional responsibility. Every version of the conversation seemed to circle back to the same place.
They’re taking away my people.
I listened for a while before finally putting my arm around him and asking why he wasn’t proud. These were good people. They had earned the opportunity. They were moving up. If I were in his shoes, I’d be celebrating. He looked at me like I’d missed the point entirely.
Knowing he was a football fan, I tried a different angle. If you were a head coach and two of your assistants just got promoted to head coach, wouldn’t that make you proud?
For a second I thought I got through to him. “Yeah man. It really would.” Then he shook his head. “But this isn’t the NFL.” Just like that he was back where he started. “They’re taking away my people.”
We left a few hours later. I’d had a few beers, so my partner drove. She had an audiobook playing while the miles rolled by. I couldn’t tell you a single thing that happened in that book. I spent the entire drive staring out the window replaying the conversation, trying to understand why it bothered me so much. At first I thought I was frustrated with him. The longer I sat with it, the more I realized that wasn’t true.
I was confused.
He was a director. I was a project manager going into my second year. He had more authority than I did, and more experience on paper. Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that I understood something he didn’t. That wasn’t satisfying. It wasn’t validating.
It was uncomfortable.
If he doesn’t see this and I do, what exactly does that mean?
It was somewhere between nine and midnight, the audiobook was still playing. I was still trying to understand why that conversation had followed me for hundreds of miles.
Eventually it clicked.
I have seen this pattern before, the same lesson sitting underneath managers who made people feel guilty for taking vacations. The same lesson sitting underneath leaders who held information too tightly because they were afraid of becoming replaceable. He wasn’t upset because his people were succeeding. He was upset because their success exposed something he wasn’t prepared for. Once that thought formed, everything else snapped into place. The promotions weren’t the problem. The problem was that he was unprepared.
Somewhere during that drive I stopped thinking about him and started thinking about myself and my team.
Why had this felt so obvious to me? Why had I recognized the pattern so quickly? Why did it bother me the way it did? Was I unprepared the way he was?
I sat for a long time with these questions.
I had a team. How was I going to prepare them, develop leaders, and create opportunities for others going forward? If I wasn’t careful, I could end up standing in the exact same room, watching someone earn something they deserved and somehow finding a way to make it about me.
That thought bothered me more than the conversation ever did. Somewhere during that drive I made a decision. I was going to be the opposite of him.
I didn’t have a framework for it. I didn’t have a process. I wasn’t thinking about succession planning or organizational design. What I had was a conviction, and somewhere on that drive home I made myself a promise: I was going to become a Force Multiplier. Not someone who just produced more, but someone who multiplied what everyone around them was capable of producing. I was going to raise the floor and the ceiling for everyone around me. Under my watch, I wanted people to grow. I wanted them prepared before the opportunity arrived. I wanted depth behind every position. I wanted the next person ready before the current person left. I wanted growth to create opportunity instead of panic.
I was determined to build a pipeline of talent to fill our workforce, and to deliberately work myself out of my current position.
· · ·
A few years later, a lead position opened on my team. I remember bringing one of my team members into my office and telling him he was being promoted. He was excited. He was nervous. He had no idea what was coming next. I spelled it out for him. I’m going to teach you to play the game. I’m going to teach you everything I know. It wasn’t a hard sell. He was all in from the start.
When a significant issue would land on my desk, I asked him to stop by my office and we’d work through the problem together. Not just the answer. The reasoning. The tradeoffs. The triggers. The things that never show up in a process document. When we finished, I’d ask him a question that became routine over the years.
Do you understand why we just talked about this?
Knowing the answer was never the point. The exposure, warning signs, and recovery was the lesson. I knew he was going to make mistakes that came with the territory. When the mistake arrived, I wanted it to feel familiar, where he’d remember our conversations, and not panic. His recovery time would be quicker and the stress level minimal.
Years later I reached out to him. By then he was running his own department. I asked if the things we used to talk about ever come up. He laughed.
All the time. And now I teach others to play the game as I was taught.
Our conversation lasted less than five minutes, but I smiled for the rest of the day.
· · ·
I finally understood what had bothered me so much at that Christmas party. It wasn’t that a director had failed to celebrate two promotions, although this doesn’t sit well either. It was that he saw someone else’s growth as something being personally taken away from him.
I saw it as an opportunity for someone to grow.
That’s the promise I made driving home that night, and the one I kept every time someone joined my team. To give away what I’d learned, so none of it ended with me.
The question is, what are you going to do with everything you’ve learned?
Do you protect what you’ve learned and build your identity around being the person everyone depends on?
Or do you give it away?