The real mission of a manager is to become useless

The day I understood that the real mission of a manager is to become useless is the day when I became a much better manager. 

When your focus is to grow your team so that they take over your job / role, then you start creating a lot more value for them, for your organization and even for yourself.

The unsecured managers will try to keep the control (information & knowledge) so that they are always needed and cannot be replaced. This is the wrong approach as it will get their team to leave, at least the ones who want to grow (and they are the ones we want to keep), and they will slow down everyone else around them since they will be static, they will try to make sure the environment is not changing.

I ask very often to managers who in their teams could replace them and this question makes some of them uncomfortable while the ones who are unsecured are the ones uncomfortable with this question. 

When your daily focus is to invest on the ecosystem around you so that you are no longer needed then you will automatically focus on growing your team, sharing knowledge with them, teaching them to fish (to use the famous expression). You will then automatically focus your time and energy on what can have a lasting influence since only those long term actions can help you become useless. 

When I started to think that way I thought that at the end I would have less work, more time, I was wrong, and this is the second great indirect effect of this mindset. When you think and act to have a long term impact you are actually starting to focus on the big things, the big projects, the ones that are usually more difficult, complex. Those projects that you have always postponed, always with “good” reasons, because you were too busy…

By changing my mindset, I grew my team, I structured the organization and then I worked on bigger projects, I learned a lot more, I started to have a bigger impact and at the end of the day the entire organization started to benefit from this. We learn so much more once we start to focus on the long term.

I have met several founders who sold their businesses because they started to become bored, they were not learning anymore. I have never been in that situation, I feel that everyday I become less stupid, because I always try to move forward and be focused on the next step, on the next project, difficult, painful, complex, that will help my team, my organization and myself to grow. And this can be done in any type of job, whatever size of the team, business, market. This depends on our mindset, on your goal… do you want to keep doing your current job forever, or you want to keep growing? One of my favorite book is Mindset from Carol Dweck.

However, we should never confuse the managers who are trying to become useless with the ones who are actually useless. I have seen too many champions of forwarding everything with the usual excuse that they are very good at delegating. If the manager is not bringing any value, is not teaching their teams, and they just forward tasks, they are actually useless, and in that case if they have not asked to get more projects, tasks, work or another job, it means that you need to let them go.

It is always critical to make sure that everyone in the organization is adding value, starting with oneself.