Learning How to Follow Makes You a Better Leader. Here's How — and When — to Step Back.

Learning How to Follow Makes You a Better Leader. Here’s How - and When - to Step Back. There’s a time for stepping up and a time for stepping back and supporting. Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways Being a leader doesn’t mean you are always THE leader. You must learn how to read the room to know who actually owns the situation and step back, supporting rather than controlling. Ask yourself: Who has the leading role in owning the situation? What are we trying to accomplish? How do I support? Offer support to the designated leader in a way that keeps the spotlight on them. This can be done by asking questions, reinforcing a decision or offering guidance privately. I sit on trade association committee meetings with other CEOs and have noticed that sometimes it’s hard to follow the leader when the room is full of them. Everyone is so used to being in charge that collaboration suffers, especially when a consensus is needed within the given time period to allow the committee to move forward with some decisions. In the end, we risk little actually getting accomplished. Sitting around those tables got me reflecting on how being a leader doesn’t mean you are always the leader. Situations have their own structure where someone else might be the chair, the owner, the one responsible. And if a leader cannot read that - and they walk in assuming their usual role - it creates a problem. Please don’t equate that with arrogance. The real issue here is identity confusion, where the need to be seen as a leader overrides the need to be useful, because it is expected. As leaders, half the time, we may not even notice we are stepping up when we should be stepping back. Here is what I have learned about reading the room for who actually owns the situation and what to do instead of defaulting to leadership mode. Related: To Be a Leader, You Must Know When to Follow Reading the room Too often, leadership is misidentified as control, which creates unrealistic expectations. There’s pressure to act quickly and always be right. However, if leaders don’t let go of control in situations that they should, we risk stunting people’s growth and creating a bottleneck in our own organizations. Let me give you an example. Say you’re a CEO visiting one of your manufacturing sites and an emergency hits. You are technically the most senior person there, but the GM runs this site, and it’s her crisis. What do you do? Even if she’s struggling, you don’t grab the wheel. You may act as a good advisor of hers to support, but you should definitely give her room to own the decision-making because that’s how she grows. That sort of restraint is the job now. Deloitte’s 2023 Global Human Capital Trends survey found that 34% of leaders are “not at all ready” to lead in a world where solutions are cocreated....

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