There is a particular kind of problem that comes from becoming good at your job. People start asking you to do it. Then they keep asking you. Eventually, if things go well enough, they ask you to help other people become good at it too, which is when you discover that these are not remotely the same skill.
I am learning this now.
For most of my career, competence had a fairly simple shape. Something was unclear, broken, complicated, late, politically delicate, financially ugly, or otherwise unpleasant enough that nobody was particularly excited to touch it. My job was to understand it and figure out what to do next.
I liked that arrangement. I still do. There is something satisfying about taking a problem that looks like a pile of unrelated parts and finding the structure inside it. Give me the spreadsheet. Give me the contract. Tell me what happened. Let me ask the annoying questions. Eventually, usually, I can find a path through.
That instinct has served me well, which is precisely why it has become a problem.
Now I lead people.
When someone on my team is working through something I already know how to solve, I have to resist an extraordinarily powerful professional impulse: just give it to me. I know where the issue probably is. I can write the email. I can fix the slide. I can take the call. I can explain the number. We could all save a tremendous amount of time if everyone would please step away from the keyboard.
This is not generally considered leadership.
The frustrating part is that sometimes I really can do it faster. That is what makes the lesson difficult. If my instinct were obviously wrong, growth would be much easier. Instead, I am having to learn that the most efficient way to solve today's problem may be a terrible way to build tomorrow's team.
I spent years learning how to be someone people could depend on. Now I have to learn how to make sure they do not always have to.
That has forced me to reconsider what competence looks like once responsibility extends beyond your own work. At the individual level, competence can live inside a person. You know things because you have seen some version of the problem before. Your judgment has been shaped by hundreds of decisions, mistakes, corrections, conversations, and moments when somebody more experienced asked why the hell you did it that way.
Eventually some of that becomes instinct. You look at a number and know it is wrong before you know why. You hear a recommendation and feel the missing assumption. You read an email and know which sentence the client is going to misunderstand.
That kind of judgment is useful. It is also surprisingly difficult to transfer. You cannot hand someone ten years of pattern recognition in a Teams message.
So you explain what you are seeing. You ask questions instead of supplying the answer. You let someone make a decision you would have made differently. Sometimes you watch the consequences arrive exactly where you suspected they would, and you make a sincere effort not to become unbearable about it.
All of this is slower than doing the work yourself.
It also may be the work.
I had been thinking about this mostly as a management problem until I realized I had encountered the same question years ago in a completely different part of my life.
When I was at the University of the Philippines, I was a student activist and community organizer. I spent a lot of time organizing students and people in the community around student issues, workers' issues, farmers' issues, and broader national and international issues.
A surprising amount of organizing looked very ordinary. We would go from room to room talking to students about what was happening, why we thought it mattered, and what people might do about it. Sometimes there was a mobilization coming. Sometimes there would be a walkout. Sometimes the immediate goal was simply to make sure that more people understood an issue than had understood it the day before.
Nobody had asked us to visit their classroom. There was no Outlook invitation. We went anyway.
You talked to people. You explained what you knew. They asked questions. You came back later. You found the person who cared enough to help, and that person talked to somebody else. One conversation became several. People who had been thinking privately about the same thing discovered that they were not thinking about it alone.
That mattered because information by itself does not organize anything. Neither does dissatisfaction. Neither does intelligence. You can fill a room with people who all independently believe something ought to change and still have nothing resembling collective capacity.
Somebody has to create the connections.
People have to know what other people know. They have to develop enough trust to act together. Someone has to remember what happened the last time. Someone has to bring the new person into the conversation. Knowledge has to survive the person who first acquired it. Eventually scattered understanding has to become shared understanding, and shared understanding has to become something people can actually use.
That is organization.
It turns out to be relevant in considerably less dramatic settings too.
A company can employ a hundred competent people and still be an incompetent organization. A team can contain smart people who work hard, care deeply, and know their jobs, and still fail because the knowledge stays trapped inside individual people.
One person knows the client history. Another understands the contract. Someone else knows why the system behaves the way it does even though nobody has ever bothered to document it. There is one employee who can fix the spreadsheet, so every broken spreadsheet eventually migrates toward that employee like a wounded animal returning home.
Then that person goes on vacation and the organization suddenly discovers that a meaningful portion of its institutional knowledge is drinking a margarita in Mexico.
We often call people like that indispensable as though we are giving them a compliment.
Sometimes we are describing a design flaw.
I have spent a significant portion of my career trying to become indispensable, although I do not think I would have described it that way at the time. I wanted to be useful. I wanted people to trust me with difficult things. I wanted to become the person who knew what to do when something got complicated.
Those are not terrible ambitions. I still have them.
But taken far enough, they create a strange outcome. The better you become at holding the work, the easier it becomes for everyone around you to let you keep holding it. Eventually the competence that made you valuable can begin interfering with the development of competence around you.
That is the contradiction I am trying to understand.
Leadership cannot simply mean doing more difficult work from a higher place in the org chart. At some point, the unit of competence has to change. The question can no longer be whether I know what to do. It has to become whether we know what to do.
Not whether Paolo can solve the problem, but whether the team can solve a problem Paolo has never seen. Whether knowledge survives the person who learned it first. Whether judgment becomes something we develop together instead of something everyone borrows from whoever has been around the longest.
That requires me to surrender a form of control I am very comfortable possessing.
I have to let somebody else think, including occasionally thinking badly. I have to let people ask questions whose answers I already know because the process of finding the answer may matter more than receiving it. I have to explain why I made a decision instead of simply making the decision. I have to tolerate an approach that is different from mine without treating the difference itself as evidence that civilization is nearing collapse.
And, perhaps most offensively, I occasionally have to watch somebody take twenty minutes to do something I could have done in seven.
This is apparently called development.
The irritation is funny to me because there is a much larger idea sitting underneath it. Knowledge that never leaves the person who possesses it dies there. So does experience. So does judgment.
There is nothing particularly impressive about knowing something other people do not know. The more interesting question is whether what you know increases what the people around you are capable of doing.
I think that may also explain why I keep writing these essays.
Obviously I want people to read them. I am publishing them on the internet, which would otherwise be a fairly elaborate misunderstanding of the medium. If writing eventually makes money, that would be lovely. I have children, and they continue to require food at an alarming frequency. Fame does not sound entirely terrible either. I suspect I could adjust.
But those are not really why I keep doing this.
I have spent years accumulating things in my head: things people taught me, things work taught me, things my family taught me, things I learned because I screwed something up and somebody was kind enough not to let me screw it up twice. Things I noticed in meetings, hospitals, grocery stores, airports, books, arguments, spreadsheets, relationships, and whatever rabbit hole I accidentally entered at eleven o'clock at night.
For most of my life, those things remained where I put them: in my head.
They could help me make a decision or understand a person or do my work better, but their usefulness mostly ended with me.
Writing changed that.
A thought that came from one particular experience with one particular person could leave the room where I learned it. Someone I have never met could encounter it years later and do something with it that I never anticipated.
Maybe they disagree. Maybe they improve the idea. Maybe they think I am full of shit. Maybe they forget the whole essay before finishing their coffee.
Or maybe one sentence stays.
Maybe it follows them into a meeting. Maybe it changes the question they ask. Maybe they tell it to somebody else, who changes it again. At that point it is no longer entirely mine.
Good.
When I was younger, I went room to room. Now I publish essays on the internet. The technology has improved considerably, but I am beginning to think the underlying instinct has not changed as much as I assumed.
Here is something I learned. Here is something I think matters. Let me put it somewhere another person can reach it.
That is one of the things organization does at its best. It takes something that exists privately and creates a way for people to hold it together.
A concern can become a conversation. A conversation can become shared understanding. Shared understanding can become coordinated action. Eventually a group of ordinary people becomes capable of something that none of them could have accomplished by simply becoming more impressive individuals.
That does not require everyone to think alike. In my experience, getting a group of human beings to think alike would be a considerably more ambitious project anyway.
It requires enough trust to share what we know, enough humility to know that no one person knows everything, enough structure to prevent useful knowledge from disappearing, and enough common purpose to decide what all of that capacity is actually for.
I am still learning how to do this as a manager. I still want to grab the keyboard. I still occasionally hear someone explaining a problem and think, with tremendous generosity of spirit, that I could have finished this already.
I suspect that impulse will remain with me. Maybe some of it should. There are times when experience matters and someone simply needs to make the call.
But if I remain the person who always makes it, then I have solved the immediate problem by creating a larger one.
The goal cannot be to become the smartest node in the network.
The network has to become smarter.
Maybe that is the next form of competence for me: not accumulating more ability, but making what I have learned easier to transfer. Teaching what I know without demanding that somebody become me. Creating enough room for another person's judgment to develop. Building something that does not become weaker the moment I leave the room.
There is something humbling about that because it changes the measure of the work.
For a long time, I could look at a difficult thing I had solved and know what I contributed. This is harder to see. If I do it well, eventually somebody handles the problem without calling me. Someone makes a judgment I would have trusted myself to make. Someone teaches a new person something that I once taught them.
The evidence of success may be my absence.
I am not entirely comfortable with that yet, but I think I am beginning to understand it.
We spend enormous portions of our lives learning things, acquiring skills, building experience, gaining access, developing judgment, and becoming capable. There is nothing wrong with any of that. I have spent a career doing it.
But eventually there is another question.
What good is all that competence if its benefits end with the person who accumulated it?
What happens when we stop treating ability as something to possess and start asking what it could become when it is shared, organized, challenged, and put to work with other people's ability?
I do not have a clean answer. Maybe I am not supposed to yet.
Years ago, I went room to room because information sitting in one room was not very useful.
Maybe I am still doing that.
I spent years learning how to become someone who knew what to do.
Now I am trying to learn what becomes possible when more of us do.
What is to be done?