At one point in my career, I built the work and handed it up for someone else's name on it. The handbook, the pay bands, the benefits program, the compliance plan. On paper it was theirs. In the room, it was mine.
I remember one meeting in particular. I sat along the wall while the leadership team walked through a compensation structure I'd spent weeks building, every band, every rationale, every number. The person at the head of the table presented it as their own and fielded the questions I had already written the answers to. Afterward, they thanked me for my help. Help. The line that came back on the small things was some version of, "can you enter this in for me? I'll approve it." I even offered, more than once, to build the decks they'd carry upstairs and deliver as theirs. "Happy to put this together for you."
That's the part I don't get to leave out. I performed the deference. I sent the "thank you so much" and the "let me know how you'd like to proceed," and some of that was respect and some of it was survival, learning to make myself easy to approve of. I'm telling on myself as much as on anyone.
What a chair can hide
The meetings were full. The title was real. What I went looking for, and couldn't find, was what existed because they held the seat. A system that would outlast them. A person they'd developed who could point to them as the reason. In fairness, they did protect their people, and that counts. But protecting isn't building, and the building wasn't there.
The strange gift of watching it was the question it left in me. If I held a seat like that, what would anyone be able to point to?
So I started running a check on myself, and I still run it. If I walked out tomorrow, would anything exist that didn't before me? Would anyone be more capable than the day I arrived? Would a system keep running because I built it to, or wobble because it had quietly been running on me? Or have I just been keeping the seat warm and calling it leadership?
That's the difference between occupying a role and doing it. Occupying is the title, the meetings, the being there. Doing it is what remains when you're gone.
It gets easier to dodge the more senior you are, because a big enough chair can hide an empty year for a long time. Which is exactly why it's worth asking about yourself before anyone else has to.
So this week, run it on yourself. Not "am I busy," everyone's busy. Ask what would actually be missing if you left tomorrow. If the answer comes fast, you're building something. If you have to reach for it, that's worth knowing now, while there's still time to do something with it.
This is the question I turn on myself hardest, and it's one of the ones the book is built around. You can follow how it's coming together at donovanparish.com, and I'll keep writing From a Different Angle here with you, one hard room at a time.
-Donovan
The title was never the leadership. What you leave behind is.