Be replaceable.

There is a kind of leadership advice that gets repeated until it becomes furniture. Be the person they cannot do without. I heard it for the first decade of my career and I half-believed it. The advice flatters. It says your value is your gravity. It says the work depends on you, which means you matter.

The advice is wrong, and I think it has done more quiet damage to senior leaders than almost any other thing on the leadership self-help shelf.

I will tell you why I think so.

Several years into my time as the chief product officer of a company growing too fast, I noticed something I had not noticed before. The team could not move without me. I was in every product decision. I was the person engineering escalated to when a question got hard. Sales kept me on speed-dial when a deal needed a feature commitment. I was, by every metric available to my own self-image, performing. The company was growing. The numbers were green.

I worked harder than I had ever worked. And the team I had spent two years building could not run without me.

That was not pride. That was the failure I had not yet named.

A leader whose team requires the leader to function is a leader who has not invested in the team enough. I wrote that line down for the first time in a long Sunday-afternoon document I sent to that team a few months later. I had been pulling threads on the same idea for weeks. The line landed because it inverted what I had been quietly proud of. I had been treating the team’s dependency as evidence of my value. The team’s dependency was the evidence of my failure.

The story we tell ourselves is that the senior leader earns their seat by being central. The truth is more uncomfortable. The senior leader earns their seat by making themselves the most replaceable person on the team while still making the team better than it would be without them.

These are different things, and they ask different work of you.

Being central asks you to know everything, decide everything, be present everywhere, hold the answer when the answer is hard. Being replaceable asks you to teach someone else to do each of those things, and to be willing to watch them do it differently than you would. The first is exhausting and fragile. The second is harder in the early going and durable later.

The hardest part of the second is the watching.

When a team member you have invested in makes a decision differently than you would have, you have a choice. You can step in and correct, which restores your centrality and reinforces dependency. Or you can let them run with the decision, debrief afterward, and accept that the decision will sometimes go badly and that they will learn from it in ways you could not teach them. Most senior leaders default to the first move. They rationalize it as quality control. It is, almost always, ego dressed in operating discipline.

A test I have come to use: can the team take a decision that I would not have taken, and act on it, and recover from it without me? If yes, the team is mine. If no, the team is mine in a way that I should not be proud of.

The other test is the calendar. A senior leader’s calendar tells the truth about whether the team can run. If the calendar is full of escalations and decisions and unblocking and approvals, the team needs the leader to function. The leader is the bottleneck. You will not coach your way out of being the bottleneck. You will only coach your way out of believing that being the bottleneck is the work.

I do not think this is easy. I think it is one of the harder transitions in senior leadership, and it does not get easier when the company is growing. When the company is growing, every reason to centralize gets a louder voice. Stakes are higher. Speed matters. Errors are more visible. The temptation to step in is at its peak exactly when the cost of stepping in is at its peak.

Most senior leaders I work with arrive having succeeded at being central. The transition is not into a softer or kinder posture. It is into a harder discipline, which is the discipline of building work that does not require you. The disciplines that produce that kind of work look almost nothing like the heroics that produced the senior leader’s promotion. That is part of why this is hard. The career-rewarded behaviors and the role-required behaviors stop being the same thing somewhere between the director seat and the VP seat, and most senior leaders never get an explicit conversation about that shift.

I am still not done with this work. I will catch myself, two or three times a quarter, about to step in on a decision a coach client could make on their own. The decision is usually small. The pattern, if I let it run, would not be small. Being replaceable is not a state you arrive at. It is a posture you keep choosing.

The advice that gets repeated until it becomes furniture is the advice you stop questioning. I stopped questioning be the person they cannot do without for almost a decade. Then I noticed what it had cost the team I was leading. I have not unlearned it cleanly. But I have stopped trying to be central, and the work has gotten better since I stopped.