Lead Like You're Leaving

The best delivery leading I’ve ever done happened when I was on my way out.

Not because I stopped caring — because I finally stopped holding on. Wanting to be needed is human; it’s what makes us feel secure and our work feel meaningful. But when you’re handing off your work, something shifts: the team gets more autonomous, more resilient, and better ideas start surfacing in the gaps where you used to be. Turns out some of what I called “value-add” was just me accidentally blocking progress with outdated “ways of working”.

Think of it like DevOps. A good DevOps engineer automates themselves out of a job — not so they can be fired, but so the system runs without paging at 3am. The goal was never to be the bottleneck. It was always to build something that works without you. A delivery lead’s job is exactly the same: build teams that can deliver.

The failure mode is indispensability. If your team can’t function without you, that’s not leadership — it’s a single point of failure. And it traps you just as much as it traps them. You can’t move on to harder problems if the old ones still need you.

The practical lesson: only pick up work you plan to offload. Wearing whatever hat the team needs is something delivery leads do to model behaviour, but if you’re still wearing the hat six months later, it wasn’t modelling — it was a dependency you created. We run roles and responsibilities sessions to speed through storming and forming, not to freeze a team in time. The real structure is a team that doesn’t need to ask you, and can grow and adapt without you.

Handing off your own job is uncomfortable. It can feel like making yourself redundant. But if you stay on the team, you move to higher-value problems. And if you’re moving on, your former colleagues remember you as someone who builds systems and teams that work. Either way, you win.

Our work backlog is infinite. Until the robots are serving us all margaritas on the beach, there’s always more to do. You don’t need to clutch the piece you’ve already built — let it run, and go build something harder.