My Seattle Seahawks are on HBO's Hard Knocks this season, and I couldn't be happier.
If you're not familiar with the show, each season, HBO camera crews follow around a NFL team during training camp and pre-season. It's a real look at teams as they prepare for the season and shows all the good, the bad, and the ugly that comes with being at the top of your game as a player, coach and organization.
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One of the things I found the most interesting wasn't a big hit or an interview, it was a real moment that head coach Mike Macdonald had with a player named Nick Emmanwori.
Emmanwori was essentially looking to his head coach for an answer. Tell me what to do. Tell me what the right decision is. Tell me which direction I should go. Macdonald could have answered the question in about ten seconds, and honestly, that probably would have been easier for both of them. Instead, he pushed the question back toward Emmanwori and made him think through it himself.
That is leadership.
There is a massive difference between creating people who know how to follow instructions and creating people who know how to think. The first one might make your life easier as a manager today. The second one makes your organization stronger tomorrow. If every person who works for you needs you to make every difficult decision, solve every complicated problem, and tell them exactly what to do next, then you haven't really developed anyone. You have just created dependency.
This happens constantly in our careers. We go to our boss and ask, "What should I do?" We ask mentors what decision we should make. We ask friends whether we should take the job, leave the company, ask for the promotion, move across the country, or take the risk. Sometimes we aren't actually looking for advice. We're looking for someone else to take ownership of the decision so we don't have to live with the consequences if it goes badly.
A boss who always has the answer might feel comforting, but a boss who helps you learn how to find the answer yourself might change your career.
Great leaders don't always give you that escape hatch.
Sometimes the best thing a manager can do is make you sit in the discomfort of figuring it out yourself. They can give you context. They can ask better questions. They can challenge your assumptions. They can point out something you might be missing. But eventually, you need to develop the confidence and judgment to say, "This is what I think we should do, and here is why."
That is also something you should be looking for in the people you choose to work for. A boss who always has the answer might feel comforting, but a boss who helps you learn how to find the answer yourself might change your career. One makes you better at doing your current job. The other prepares you for a job you haven't even earned yet.
Mike Macdonald could have just told his player what to do. Instead, he made him own the decision. There is a lesson in that for every manager, every employee, and frankly, every one of us trying to build a career. Stop looking for someone else to hand you the answer all the time. At some point, the next step in your growth is learning to trust your own fucking judgment.