By Chally Kacelnik
Most leaders don’t struggle because they lack technical capability or commitment. The struggle often comes because they’re doing work that shouldn’t sit with them in the first place.
It’s common to see highly capable leaders submerged in operational detail: approving routine decisions, resolving issues that should sit at a different level of work, or reworking outputs their teams should own. Over time, this pulls leaders away from the work that is their domain, like setting direction and designing fit for purpose systems.
This usually isn’t a discipline problem, although sometimes it is. This submersion is generally a design problem.
Ideally, decisions should sit at the lowest relevant level of work. When we at LKS Quaero talk about levels of work, this is a model that ranges from the hands on work of frontline work, through increasing levels of complexity to the CEO-level work of shaping the organisation for the future. Levels of work are tied to specific expectations for the work of a role.
However, when roles and accountabilities are unclear, work runs upwards. Team members escalate decisions because they’re unsure where authority sits and they don’t want to cop it, or because previous attempts to act were questioned or overridden. Leaders step in to “help”. Before long, the leader becomes the default decisionmaker for everything.
The result is that teams become dependent and important work stalls because the leader has become the (very stretched) bottleneck.
Getting leaders back to the right level of work requires more than telling them to “delegate more”. It requires clarity about what decisions belong where, and confidence that those decisions will be supported. When accountabilities are well defined, leaders can let go of tasks without losing control, because the system itself provides assurance.
At LKS Quaero, we work with leaders to diagnose where work is sitting and why. Sometimes, this is about making sure that people are equipped with the skills needed to perform their work. But it’s also about redesigning how authority is distributed so leaders can focus on the work that genuinely requires their judgement. When that happens, leaders regain capacity, teams grow in capability, and the organisation functions far more effectively.
At LKS Quaero, we help leaders to do the right work. For more information, visit us at lksquaero.com or follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook.
