5 min read · The Pillars I Stand On
I was at a Christmas party when a peer of mine found out he was losing two of his top assistants. They were being promoted. He wasn’t crying, but he was whining. Consistently. Loudly. All about himself. What this was going to do to him. How much extra work he was going to have to carry. How the timing couldn’t be worse.
I stood there and listened for a while. The whole time one thought kept running through my head: how are you not proud of this moment?
I put my arm around him and asked him directly. Why aren’t you celebrating right now instead of drowning in your sorrows? This is good for them. It’s good for the company. I’d be proud if I were you.
How could I be proud man? They’re taking away my people.
I knew he was a football guy so 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?
He thought about it. Yeah man. It really would. Then there was a pause. But, this isn’t the NFL man.
He almost got there. He could see it for half a second and then he pulled himself right back.
They’re taking away my people.
That phrase is the whole problem in four words. They were never his people to keep.
I’d seen that kind of unpreparedness before. Earlier in my career I had a manager who didn’t take vacations. That was his choice and I respected it. What I didn’t respect was what he did with it. He projected it onto everyone around him. When I wanted to take time off he made me feel like I was personally attacking him. Like my vacation was a betrayal. His problem wasn’t me. It was that he hadn’t built anything that could run without him. So he couldn’t leave. Because he couldn’t leave, he resented anyone who could.
I made a decision somewhere in that experience. I was never going to be that person. Not because it was bad leadership, though it was, but because I wanted my life. I wanted a vacation. I wanted to step away and actually be somewhere else without my phone going off every hour and the only way to do that was to build a team that didn’t need me standing in the room for things to keep moving.
I’ll be honest, I was looking out for myself. Here’s what I found: the selfish version and the selfless version produced exactly the same behavior. Train your people. Build depth behind every key position. Create a ladder people can actually climb. Not everyone needs or wants to be promoted. Some people are exactly where they want to be and a team needs those people just as much as it needs the ones climbing. However, if I saw something in someone they couldn’t yet see in themselves, I was going to let them know my findings. If they came to me wanting more, I was never going to shut the door on them. When you do all of that, you get your vacation. Your people get their shot. The operation doesn’t skip a beat.
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I have a saying I tell every person who ends up on my team.
I never want to tell you no.
I never wanted anyone on my team to get a last minute invitation, two tickets to a baseball game, a family thing, whatever it was, and feel that knot in their stomach. Oh man, I gotta ask my boss. I don’t know if he’s gonna go for this. I wanted them to say yes before they even picked up the phone and then call me as a formality.
Hey I got two tickets to the game today, I’m pretty sure you’re gonna say yes but
Yes. Go. Have a great time. We’ll pick each other up.
That’s the culture I set out to build and we built it.
The cynic reading this might say, well how often did you get taken advantage of? Not once. The street went two ways and everyone knew it. When someone needed help the team stepped up, not because they were told to, but because they understood their day would come. When somebody got an opportunity nobody treated it like a loss because we had already been preparing for it. The culture carried itself. The team carried itself.
That’s the part people miss. When you build a team that doesn’t need you, they don’t become less capable, they become more capable. They stop depending on one person and start depending on each other. Growth stops feeling like a threat and starts feeling like what it actually is: a win for everyone in the room.
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Looking back, I think that’s what bothered me most at that Christmas party. It wasn’t the complaining or the workload or even the promotions themselves. It was the assumption underneath all of it.
They’re taking away my people.
No. They’re growing your people. There’s a difference and it matters. One mindset sees growth as something being taken from you. The other sees it as something being created. Some people never understand this concept. They just carry it higher. The title changes. The flaw stays the same.
The best leaders I ever worked for understood something different. The goal was never to hold onto people. The goal was to prepare them. When the day came for them to leave, get promoted, or step into something bigger, the right response was never panic. It was pride.
The reality is, they were never your people to keep.
When someone on your team outgrows you, is your first instinct panic, or pride?