As the September crunch hits, this is something I think about. Am I leading my team or am I just in a leadership role? When I have days like yesterday, when I’m consumed with stuff that needs to get done and the tasks that keep coming at me have me pinned to my desk… I feel more like a manager than any kind of leader. I know it’s a balance, I know this work needs to get done, but it seems to me that the required management tasks have a way of increasing and multiplying over time.

So, the role of both leader and manager starts to feel less like something you can do simultaneously, and more like an inverse relationship. Spend more time on leadership, the management aspect suffers, spend more time on management and you’ve got less time to lead.

Knowing this and feeling like the management role has grown over the years is tough. Distributing the leadership helps a lot, but that is a delicate balance as well. There is a difference between authentically sharing leadership and delegating work and tasks. Sometimes the difference is simply in interpretation, sometimes the intent seems to have motive. I guess that too is a challenge of leadership. How do you share the leadership such that you can get more of everything done?

Do this well, get more done. Do this poorly, your team suffers, and so do you. I’m not going to bother with trying to draw another image, but essentially the goal is to move the entire line to the right… you are getting more done with both aspects, but the relationship is still inverted.

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All this said, it has been a smoother startup than last year. It feels like it’s going to be a great year ahead. Metaphorically, I feel like a juggler and I’ve got all the balls in the air… and I’m making it work, but hoping no one throws another ball my way.