Leading from the Core

Your Managers Should Be Owning Their Work

Series: Building Your Farm Team

Let me ask you something directly.

Think about the last two weeks. How much of your time was spent on things that should have been handled at the manager level? Decisions that escalated to you, problems that came back around because they were not handled right the first time, questions that should have been answered one level below you.

If the honest answer is more than it should be, you are not alone. And it is worth sitting with why.

A Different Way to Think About What a Manager Is For

Here is a concept I have been thinking about a lot lately and I think it reframes the whole conversation about mid-manager development in a useful way.

A capable manager should take ownership of their work.

Think about what that means in practice. Every decision that gets made at the manager level is a decision that does not land on your desk. Every people problem that gets handled before it escalates is a problem that does not consume your time and attention. Every difficult conversation a manager has proactively is a crisis that never develops.

When that is happening and your managers are genuinely owning the full weight of their role, you get something that is hard to quantify but impossible to miss once you experience it. You get your time back. You get to focus on the work that only you can do. You get an organization that runs with the kind of momentum that does not depend on your constant involvement to sustain it.

That is leadership leverage. And it is what a fully developed manager creates.

What Happens When the Leverage Is Missing

When managers are not fully owning their role, the opposite happens, and they push work and responsibility back up to their boss.

It does not usually happen dramatically. It is quieter than that. It is the steady accumulation of small escalations, repeated questions, and situations that should not require your involvement.

And here is the part that makes it hard to address. Most of the managers creating this dynamic are not doing it intentionally. They are not avoiding responsibility. They are working hard, showing up every day, and genuinely trying to do their jobs well.

What they are missing, in most cases, is not effort or intention. It is a clear framework for what fully owning the role actually looks like. Nobody sat with them and defined what it means to take responsibility for the work rather than pass it back up.

Nobody coached them through the shift from operating as a strong individual contributor to operating as a genuine leader who creates capacity for the people above and below them.

That is a development gap. Not a character gap.

A Few Questions Worth Sitting With

Here are some questions that are worth some honest reflection this week:

1. When your managers come to you with a problem, are they bringing you a decision they need you to make or a recommendation they want your input on?
2. When something goes wrong on one of their teams, are you hearing about it from them proactively or finding out after the fact because it escalated past the point of easy resolution?
3. When you look at how your time is actually being spent, how much of it is work that your managers should own but are not fully carrying?

There are no right or wrong answers here. But the pattern those answers reveal is worth paying attention to. Because the gap between where your managers are and where they need to be is almost always closeable with the right development, the right support, and the right investment at the right time.

What is your experience with this? I would genuinely like to hear how this shows up in your organization.