Many years ago in my twenties I’d stumbled on a role that required me to lead a small team. Everything was new then aka I didn’t have a clue. I thought that in order to be effective I had to be super hands on, executing alongside the designers and strategists at breakneck pace whilst trying to work out how to delegate work. But this was the problem. And I’ll never forget Max, an ad agency vet, who told me at the time ‘it’s not about content it’s context’. His wise words capture the essence of this post.
Why is this important? And how on earth is a team ‘without’ a leader meant to function. Whatever size org you’re in you’ll most probably be stuck in back to back meetings. Your calendar probably looks like a game of Tetris and your slack message notifications sound like 80 people sweeping up a dusty barn! Being an effective leader when so much is going on is vital to your success and the company’s mission.
The Dependency Trap
Building a team that doesn’t need you isn’t about delegation or empowerment programmes. It’s about being honest about what only you can do, and then systematically making that list smaller.
Most leaders get this backwards. They think the goal is to build a team they can delegate to. But delegation still centres you. It still requires you to parcel out work, maintain oversight, and be the arbiter of quality. You’re still the sun that everything orbits around.
What you actually want is a team that operates with full autonomy within a clear framework. The difference is huge.
This means documenting your thinking, not just your decisions (Circle back to what Max meant when he said ‘context over content’). When you approve a feature direction, don’t just say yes, explain the three factors that made it obvious to you. When you kill an idea, show your working. Do this enough and people stop needing to ask because they can run your algorithm themselves. This also up-skills the team in empirical thinking!
The Real Work
Here’s what making yourself less needed actually looks like:
Codify your principles. Not values. Everyone has values. Principles are the rules you use to make trade-offs when two good things conflict. “Move fast” vs “Get it right” which wins when? Write it down. Make it real. Make it repeatable. e.g: “We ship fast to learn but never at the cost of user trust or safety.”
Narrate your reasoning. In every review, every critique, every strategic conversation, explain the pattern you’re matching against. “This reminds me of when we…” or “The risk here is the same one we saw in…” This is how you build a shared library of heuristics.
Create forcing functions. I once worked with a founder who refused to review any work until the team had spent 30 minutes discussing it amongst themselves first. Painful at first. Transformative within weeks. People started catching their own issues. The quality of what reached him improved dramatically. He’d engineered himself out of low-value decision-making.
Let people fail at things that don’t matter. This is the hard one. You know the junior PM is about to run a workshop that’s not quite structured right. You could step in. Don’t. Let them learn. Your job is to ensure failures are cheap and the learning is expensive. Get that ratio right and suddenly you’re building senior people, not permanent juniors. This is something I value deeply – with product it is never right to insist on perfection until product maturity is so solid that the bar has already been realised (possible but rare). Provide a safe space for the team!
The Psychological Barrier
The uncomfortable truth is that if your team genuinely needs you for day-to-day decisions, you’ve either hired the wrong people or you’ve trained them to be dependent. Both are your fault – sorry!
And if we’re being honest, there’s often something satisfying about being needed. It feels like proof of your value. It’s immediate validation that you’re important. Every question is a small hit of professional significance.
But that’s ego talking, not leadership.
I see this particularly in founders and early leaders who’ve built something from nothing. They remember every decision that mattered. They’ve got scar tissue from every wrong turn. Of course they want to protect the thing they’ve built. Of course they worry that others won’t care as much, won’t see the patterns, won’t maintain the standards.
The problem is that this instinct, left unchecked, becomes the ceiling on your organisation’s growth. You can only scale as far as your personal capacity to review, approve, and decide. That’s not a company. That’s a consultancy with employees.
What You’re Actually For
Your job is to make yourself obsolete at your current level so you can focus on the next one. If you’re still the person reviewing every wireframe or approving every experiment, you’re not leading you’re just expensive overhead.
So what should you be doing instead?
Setting context, not content. Where are we going? Why does it matter? What does success look like? What are we learning about the market, the customer, the competitive landscape that should change how we think? This is the work only you can do because you’re the only one with the full picture. The team figure out the content from the context.
Removing obstacles the team can’t see or solve. That misalignment with the exec team? That’s yours. The budget conversation that’s creating weird incentives? Yours. The organisational dysfunction that means design and engineering can’t collaborate properly? Also yours.
Maintaining standards without micromanaging. You should be the person who notices when quality is slipping, when the bar is lowering, when shortcuts are becoming habits. But you shouldn’t be the person enforcing this in every interaction. That should be the culture. Your job is to tune the culture. Don’t nitpick with individuals but instead speak to the team about your quality bar.
Hiring people better than you. Then getting out of their way. Then celebrating when they make you look pedestrian. Be a humble leader like this and you’ll scale your company like never before.
The Test
The best compliment I ever received was when someone said, “Things ran better when you were on holiday.” That’s not a failure of leadership. That’s the entire point. You can test it – sometimes it won’t work and the results might require hard decisions (I’ve been there!).
If your team can’t function without you for a fortnight, you haven’t built a team you’ve built a dependency structure with you at the centre. And the moment you want to grow, scale, or focus on anything strategic, that structure collapses.
Here’s the diagnostic: Cancel all your meetings for a week. Don’t tell anyone why. Don’t give extra guidance beforehand. Just… step back. What breaks? What doesn’t get done? Where do things stall?
That’s your real job description. Everything else is theatre.
The goal isn’t to be unnecessary. It’s to be necessary for the right things. The things that actually compound. The things that only you can do because of your unique position, perspective, or relationships.
Building a team that doesn’t need you is how you become genuinely indispensable.