Hands-off Leadership Transition

There's this difficult state a leader has to go through where they transition from mostly hands on to mostly hands off, which challenges their internal sense of control.

Suddenly you have to (effectively) blindly trust that the team knows what they're doing. This is hard to do, especially when the team is working on "your baby".

And then if you start meddling in from a far while lacking context, you're counter-productive. Even if you're making the right decisions within a given context, if your context is incomplete, the decisions will likely be sub-optimal.

Plus, anything you do or say as a leader carries implicit authority and can easily be interpreted as a command. Saying things in passing will ripple through. Any involvement you do carries a cost.

So you have to be very careful about if, when, and how you intervene and there's no easy answer to that.

One thing that definitely helps is to develop trustworthy lieutenants who can work more closely with the team and who's high level decisions you can trust.

Another is to clearly (and persistently) communicate your vision to your team.

You have to do it persistently it for it to stick (and resist the worry of sounding overly repetitive).

Your internal monologue needs to become your teams internal monologue.

You need to trust that, in most situations, your team would make the same decisions as you when faced with the same circumstances.

One quick way I found to work for verifying that your ideas are transferring correctly is to have your counterparty explain back to you what they understood from what you said. If they say the same thing in their own words, then you're aligned. If not, you know what's misaligned and can discuss further as necessary.