A leader in one of my cohorts was describing the culture he wanted to build, and his plan came down to leading by example. He wanted anyone who walked through the door to feel like a million bucks.
So I asked how he planned to set that tone.
“I’ll lead by example,” he said. “I’ll be the first one to welcome everybody. I’ll show them how it’s done.”
Listen to what that actually says. He wants his team to make people feel welcome, and his plan is that he will be the one who does the welcoming.
He just cut everyone out. Nobody on his team walked away with more clarity, more coaching, or a clearer expectation. What they learned is that welcoming people is his job.
When “Leading by Example” Hurts Your Team
I hear some version of this almost every week, and I understand why. Most of the leaders I work with are solution people. When the team is short-staffed, they cover the shift. When the team is stressed, they jump in and carry the load, and they tell themselves it’s good for morale.
Very few leaders will say, “I’m stuck in the weeds.” They’ll say, “I’m leading by example.” Sometimes those are the same thing, which is what makes it so hard to see. From the inside, getting stuck in the weeds usually feels like generosity.
Why Urgency Follows the Work
A day later, I told that story to a different group. One leader there had been wrestling with a manager who kept missing a basic, recurring deadline: getting the staff schedule out on time. It ran late enough that they came up short-handed on a busy weekend, and he spent it covering the gap himself instead of being where he’d planned to be. He’d tried everything, even drafting the schedule himself to make it easier.
Then he stopped mid-thought. “Maybe I’m taking it off his plate,” he said, “and now there’s no urgency.”
That’s the part of leading by example nobody warns you about. Urgency follows the work. Whoever is holding the task is the one who feels the pressure to finish it. When you pick it up, even to help, you take the urgency with you, and the person you were trying to develop gets to relax.
How Small Favors Become a Bottleneck
Do that enough times and the favors add up to a system. Every decision, every fix, every hard call routes through you, because you’ve taught everyone that’s where it goes. Then you wonder why your leadership team won’t step up, when the honest answer is that you never stepped back far enough to leave them room. It’s the same pattern behind why so many leaders can’t let go and what holding on really costs.
The Slower Road to a Capable Leadership Team
Equipping your team is the slower route. It will always feel uncomfortable. It will always feel too slow. It’s never going to be as good as if you’d done it yourself.
Another leader in that group came in with a win: she’d taken most of a week off, and almost nobody called her. Before she left, she handed one of her people a stretch assignment, running a community event on his own. It didn’t go well. The participants never noticed, but she did.
Aim for Better Challenges
It would be easy to file that under failure. I offered a different read. The goal isn’t to end all challenges. It’s to get to better challenges. “I can’t leave or everything falls apart” was her old challenge, and she’d solved it. “My person ran the event and it was rough” is a better one, because it’s a problem you can coach.
She got there before I finished. “I should definitely take more PTO,” she said, “and give them more stretch assignments until they get really good at it.”
That’s the shift.
What You Can Do Today: Go First in Asking
So where is leading by example quietly keeping your leadership team in the weeds?
You probably can’t see it clearly, because from where you’re standing it looks like helping. It’s hard to read the label from inside the jar, but your team can see it. If you want one place to lead by example, go first in asking. At your next leadership team meeting, put these questions on the table:
Where am I stepping on your toes?
Where am I getting in the way?
What are we not getting to because I’m focused here?
Then wait longer than feels comfortable for the first answer.
They already know. The only question is whether you’ll make it safe for them to tell you.
Ready to get your leadership team out of the weeds?
If leading by example has quietly become the way everything routes through you, contact me to talk about what it could look like to build a leadership team that carries more of the load.
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