There’s a moment in hard stretches when leaders stop leading.
It doesn’t look like abdication. It looks like effort. They’re in early, head down, doing. Answering emails that aren’t theirs to answer. Solving problems that belong to someone else. Moving things forward. Or so it feels.
But direction quietly goes dark.
The team keeps moving, because that’s what good teams do. They fill the vacuum with their best guesses, their competing priorities, their own noise. And the leader, buried in doing, doesn’t notice because doing feels like helping.
I see this pattern often. Usually in the hard stretches, when pressure is high and everything feels urgent. The instinct to roll up your sleeves is understandable. Even admirable, on the surface.
But the work that only a leader can do: naming what matters, setting the direction, helping people see where they’re going, doesn’t get done when the leader is doing everyone else’s.
The quiet question I keep sitting with:
What have you stopped leading because you started doing?