Who's Doing Your Job While You're Doing Theirs?
It was 7:15 on a Tuesday morning. The VP of Operations was on the shop floor, approving an overtime request and rewriting next week's shift schedule.
The plant manager stood next to him. Watching. Slightly confused about what his own job was now.
Meanwhile, back in the conference room, the three-year capacity plan was still a blank slide. It had been a blank slide since March.
Nobody was lazy. Everybody was busy. That was the problem.
Everybody moves down a level
Here's how it usually goes. The CEO does the VP's job. The VP does the manager's job. The manager does the supervisor's job. The supervisor jumps on the line because someone called in sick.
Everyone is working hard. Everyone is working below their pay grade.
So who's doing the CEO's job?
Nobody. That's who.
Why smart leaders drift down
It's not a character flaw. It's gravity.
The work you used to do is familiar. You were good at it. That's why you got promoted. It's concrete. You can finish it by lunch and feel productive.
The work at your level is fuzzy. Strategy. Alignment. Building the next layer of leaders. It doesn't come with a checkbox. It rarely feels done.
So when the week gets hard, you reach for what you know. Just this once. Every week.
How to recognize it in your organization
Your senior leaders know every detail of every open order, but can't tell you where the business needs to be in three years.
Leadership team meetings are status updates. Nobody decides anything that couldn't have been decided one level down.
Decisions keep floating up to you that your managers should be making.
Your managers seem passive. (They're not passive. They've learned their boss will do it anyway.)
Strategic projects sit on the calendar for months, while urgent fires get handled in hours.
Your top leaders are exhausted, and your bench of future leaders is thin.
When someone takes a vacation, nothing changes. Or everything stops.
If several of those sound familiar, your organization is probably working a level or two below where it's built to work.
What it costs
You pay executive salaries for supervisor work. That part is obvious.
The bigger cost is invisible. The future doesn't get planned. Your next leaders don't get developed, because nobody gives them room to lead. And the people below feel micromanaged, even when that was never anyone's intent.
How to climb back up
Name the work at each level. Get your leadership team to agree, out loud, on what only they can do. Write it down. Yes, actually write it down.
Audit a week. Look at your calendar. How much of it was work that someone below you could do, or should be learning to do?
Hand it off for real. Delegating and then hovering doesn't count. Agree on the outcome, then get out of the way.
Protect time for the fuzzy work. If strategy only happens when there's nothing urgent, it will never happen.
The question for your team
If you looked at last week's calendar, whose job were you actually doing?
If the answer made you wince a little, let's talk. Book a 30-minute conversation.