“I just realized I don’t want to do the things you’re pushing me on.”
At the beginning of the summer I was working with a second year charter network Executive Director on her goals for the year, and I noticed a pattern. Every goal she drafted started the same way. “Along with the Chief Academic Officer, I will…” “Together with the Executive Team we will…”
I named the pattern: “Your goals should be the work only you can do. The altitude only you can see. Yes, you’re overseeing those outcomes but what is yours alone?”
This is an exceptionally talented leader. But no matter how I pushed, she wasn’t landing on the work that only she can accomplish. We went back and forth three or four times, which almost never happens with her, and I could feel us getting stuck.
So I stopped, leaned into the tension and asked how she was feeling.
“Frustrated,” she grumbled.
“Why?”
“I just realized I don’t want to do the things you’re pushing me on. I love this job because of the people. The students. The staff- even the few that are grumpy.. I don’t want my whole job to be strategic planning and fundraising and navigating the charter board and building leases and networking and all that.”
She had been a teacher for many years, then a highly accomplished principal, then four years as a Chief Academic Officer.
And there it was. She had a sense of the altitude I was pointing at. She just didn’t want to go up there, seemingly further and further away from everything that made the job meaningful for her.
I had been coaching like it was a skills gap, but I wasn’t attending to the loss she was feeling.
“That makes sense. So what do we do with that?” I asked.
“I think I just may have to accept that my job has fundamentally changed. How I add value has shifted,” she replied.
Here’s what I’ve been thinking about since. When we talk about growing as a leader and promotions and taking on more responsibility, we often only talk about addition. More skills. More impact. More influence. Being “thrilled” on LinkedIn.
We don’t often talk about the loss involved.
Loss of being the person with the answer. Loss of the roadmap. Loss of being close enough to the work to feel it land. And loss of the thing nobody says out loud, which is that you were good at the old job and you have no proof yet that you’ll be good at this one.
And when leaders struggle to let go of the old version of themselves or their roles, we often call them control freaks. Micromanagers. We point out their inability to delegate. All of that can be true. But we may be overlooking a leader’s reaction to an identity shift. They may just be scared out of their minds, holding tight to the last version of the job that made sense or the parts they love and enjoy.
I’m speaking from experience. I’m in the middle of some of that shifting right now.
Over the past year we’ve made hires that changed what’s possible. More capacity on the team means more time for the work that’s only mine. Fundraising. Strategy. Disciplined growth. Aligning our impact with our vision and mission. Making it clear who we are in the world.
That shift is additive and exciting. My ability to focus on the future means we can keep making strides toward our vision of better leaders who stay longer for Black kids.
It also involves loss. When I started at SLL I was on the program side, coaching in schools, having immediate impact. As ED, I do far less of that direct work with our people. In order to stay close to the work and humble, I always coach one leader or own one project, but that work is a fraction of what it used to be by the nature of my role.
Where I feel the most loss is shifting my identity as the problem solver in chief. I pride myself on seeing around corners and finding a solution through grit and determination. There’s a version of this I catch myself in almost weekly. Someone brings me a problem, and before they’ve finished the sentence I’m already drafting the fix in my head.
The discipline now is understanding that my role in challenges is different. Just because I see a challenge doesn’t mean I’m the one to push up my sleeves and tackle it. We’ve built a team that is capable of taking what I or someone else surfaces and handling it after I make the expected outcome clear. Maybe they handle it differently than I would have. Often, because they’re closer to the issue, better than I would have.
None of this is easy. Growth doesn’t always feel like addition. A lot of times it feels like loss and subtraction.
As we start this new school year, with new roles and shifting identities, watch for the person on your team who isn’t stepping into the work that’s clearly theirs. Including you. Start where you should start. Role clarity. Goal setting. Altitude alignment. Get that right first.
But don’t stop there. Notice and attend to potential feelings of loss and resistance to change. Sometimes it takes a manager who pays enough attention to name the pattern of holding on too tightly out loud. And usually, it takes naming it many, many times.
Quick trick? Get curious.
Questions I ask myself when I feel the need to jump in, problem solve or take over:
Things I’m working on saying instead when I feel the urge to take back the work:
Organizations can’t run on heroics. To create stability and progress for kids, they have to rely on the knowledge and strength of the whole, not the person at the top.
The addition now is that I get to see my teammates flourish, and as a result, the leaders and schools we serve do the same. The loss is still there too. The growth for me is knowing they can co-exist.