I chose my mentor for a reason.
Until recently, I could not explain that reason.
He can get angry with me. He can criticise me. Sometimes he can burst out over something I consider relatively small. And yet, strangely, none of this has made me want to move away from him.
I remain unnecessarily loyal to him.
Why?
My first answer was power.
He is only one level above me in the hierarchy, but his access is extraordinary. He can speak to people several levels above him. He knows whom to call. He knows how to approach them. More importantly, people respond to him.
I don’t have that ability.
And perhaps that is exactly why I am attracted to studying him.
He represents a way of operating that is almost opposite to mine.
I Know How to Work
Give me something difficult and my natural response is to work harder.
I can sit longer. Read more. Follow up. Prepare. Personally check things. If necessary, I can take the task away from someone and complete it myself.
There is satisfaction in that.
It makes me feel useful.
Perhaps this programming started very early.
Study hard.
Don’t copy.
Don’t look for shortcuts.
Do your own work.
Read more.
Prepare better.
Hard work is good. Shortcuts are suspicious.
For most of my life, this programming has served me remarkably well.
But I am beginning to wonder whether the same programming eventually becomes a limitation.
Because my mentor keeps teaching me something that initially sounds almost offensive:
Don’t do.
Why should I not do something if I can do it?
His reasoning is interesting.
First, I cannot do everything.
Second, if I personally take responsibility for everything, every failure eventually becomes my failure too.
And third—and this is the part I find most difficult—I need enough strategic detachment to make other people feel responsible for delivering.
The first two points are easy for me to understand intellectually.
The third one is where my resistance begins.
My Problem May Not Be Hard Work
My problem may be that doing things myself reduces my anxiety.
A task appears.
I give it to someone.
Now uncertainty begins.
Will he do it?
Will he do it properly?
Should I follow up?
What if he fails?
What if someone asks me about it?
At some point, taking over the task starts feeling easier.
“Leave it. I’ll do it.”
And immediately the uncertainty disappears.
That makes me wonder whether my obsession with execution is always about responsibility.
Sometimes it may simply be my way of avoiding the discomfort of depending on other people.
Which creates a strange problem.
I want to perform at scale.
But I am uncomfortable with one of the fundamental requirements of scale:
Other people must carry my outcomes.
This Is Where My Mentor Fascinates Me
He doesn’t seem to have one fixed operating style.
He can be warm with someone today and extremely firm tomorrow.
He can build relationships, but he can also detach from them.
He can follow the rules meticulously when the rules help him. At other times, he studies the same rules looking for room to manoeuvre.
He seems far less interested in appearing consistent than in achieving the objective.
I sometimes think of him as a chameleon.
I don’t mean that negatively.
His behaviour changes according to what the situation demands.
Mine doesn’t change enough.
My default strategy is still something like:
Be useful.
Work hard.
Maintain relationships.
Avoid unnecessary conflict.
Solve the problem.
His strategy seems closer to:
What outcome do I want, and what behaviour will produce it?
That difference is becoming increasingly interesting to me.
The Word I Struggle With Is Ruthlessness
I want to become somebody.
Not merely hold a designation or receive a promotion. I want to know what I am capable of when I operate at scale.
That ambition creates an uncomfortable question.
Can extraordinary outcomes be produced while remaining deeply conflict-avoidant?
I don’t know.
Popular culture gives ruthlessness a bad reputation, often for good reason.
We are taught to value empathy, relationships, loyalty and kindness. Businesses talk about people first. Organisations talk about relationship-based leadership.
I believe in much of it.
But then reality creates uncomfortable situations.
Suppose someone desperately needs a job.
You employ him.
Over time, you discover that he isn’t good enough for the role.
Now what?
As a human being, I can understand his circumstances.
As the person responsible for an outcome, I have another question:
Can he perform the job?
These two questions can point in opposite directions.
And I am not yet comfortable living inside that tension.
My instinct is to absorb some of the cost myself.
Give another chance.
Help a little more.
Do part of the work.
Avoid confrontation.
Maybe things will improve.
That may be kindness.
But I increasingly wonder whether sometimes it is simply conflict avoidance wearing the clothes of kindness.
That thought bothers me.
Then There Is Steve Jobs
Recently I have been thinking a lot about Steve Jobs.
Not because I want to imitate his personality.
What fascinates me is something else.
He succeeded in one of the world’s most technical industries without being the engineer building everything himself.
His leverage was somewhere else.
Judgment.
Persuasion.
Standards.
Taste.
Storytelling.
Negotiation.
The ability to make extraordinarily capable people move toward an outcome.
That last ability interests me enormously.
Because I know how to produce through my own labour.
I don’t yet know how to produce through orchestration.
There is a ceiling to how much one person can personally execute.
There may be almost no equivalent ceiling to how much one person can cause other capable people to execute.
And perhaps that is the transition I am staring at.
From Doing to Causing
There is a question I have spent most of my life answering:
How much can I do?
Maybe the next question is:
How much can I cause to happen?
That question feels completely different.
It requires delegation.
Judgment.
Standards.
Conflict.
Accountability.
Sometimes pressure.
Sometimes silence.
Sometimes relationships.
Sometimes detachment.
And perhaps even a certain amount of ruthlessness—not ruthlessness toward people, but ruthlessness toward the outcome.
This is where I currently feel weak.
I can work hard.
I can take responsibility.
I can solve problems.
But when another person has to be held accountable, my instinct is often to reduce the friction rather than increase it.
When conflict appears, part of me still searches for harmony.
When someone fails, part of me still wants to rescue the outcome personally.
That behaviour can still produce good results.
But I am increasingly doubtful that it can produce extraordinary results at scale.
Maybe This Is My Next Behaviour Experiment
I don’t want to wake up tomorrow and pretend to be ruthless.
That would probably be ridiculous.
Nor do I want to manufacture an aggressive personality because I have seen someone else exercise power effectively.
I want to study the resistance.
Why do I feel compelled to personally solve something?
Why does delegation make me uncomfortable?
Why do I hesitate before creating consequences?
Why does another person’s discomfort sometimes feel like evidence that I am doing something wrong?
Why do I want to be liked by someone whose performance I am responsible for?
These are behavioural questions.
And perhaps they can be experimented with just like everything else.
Delegate something I would normally do.
Don’t rescue it immediately.
Allow ownership to remain with the owner.
Have the uncomfortable conversation.
Say no.
Escalate when escalation is justified.
Then watch myself.
What exactly am I afraid will happen?
That interests me more than trying to become “tough.”
Because I suspect my mentor’s real advantage isn’t that he is tougher than me.
His advantage may simply be that he has a much wider behavioural range.
He can cooperate.
He can charm.
He can pressure.
He can detach.
He can confront.
He can wait.
And he can change between these modes without worrying too much about whether each one fits some permanent image of himself.
I can’t do that yet.
But I want to learn.
Not because I want to become cruel.
Not because I want people to fear me.
And certainly not because hard work has suddenly become meaningless.
I want to learn because I have started wanting something that hard work alone cannot give me.
Scale.
I know how to work.
Now I want to discover whether I can learn how to orchestrate.