, hello, and welcome to another episode of the Growth Edge Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Laurie Baedke, and today I'm excited to record a solo episode on an important topic, and it involves a story from my own career journey. You see, there's a particular kind of leadership advice that sounds very noble in theory. Develop your people, delegate, build bench strength, create a succession plan, make yourself replaceable. All of that sounds wonderful.
Until you realize that becoming replaceable means someone may eventually replace you. And then it gets a little bit more interesting because succession planning is easy to celebrate when it's theoretical. It gets considerably more complicated when the succession is yours. I know a little something about that. A decade ago, I had the opportunity to build the healthcare executive MBA program at Creighton University. I have said time and again.
That this was a dream job and I meant it then and I mean it still today. I loved building that program. I loved imagining what it could become. I loved designing the curriculum, building relationships, recruiting faculty, shaping the student experience, solving problems, creating systems, and taking something that had only existed as an idea and helping to turn it into something very real. If anyone on this show knows me or you've listened to work,
Or writings for any amount of time, you probably know that I'm a builder. Give me a blank piece of paper and an ambitious vision, and I am very happy. I love zero to one. I love possibility. I love creating. I love figuring out what doesn't exist yet and asking what it would take to create it. But somewhere along the way, I had to be honest with myself about something. I am a much better builder than I am a maintainer.
That doesn't mean that I can't maintain something. It means I know where my energy, strengths, and contribution are greatest. And as the executive MBA program matured, the leadership it needed evolved also. The work became less about building something from scratch and more about refining and sustaining what had already been built. Even before that transition was upon us, we were thinking about the future.
As soon as the program became established enough to add a second full-time team member to the team, that recruitment was done with a longer horizon in mind. We weren't simply hiring for the work that needed to be done that year. We were thinking about what the program might need several years down the road, and
We were thinking about the type of person that would have the capacity to grow it and alongside it.
There are no guarantees when you make a hire like that. People leave, organizations change, programs can evolve in ways that we might not predict. We were incredibly fortunate. He was extraordinary. He stayed, he grew, the program grew. And over the years, he confirmed our hunch that he was extraordinarily well suited for its next chapter. So we continued to develop him toward it, intentionally, not theoretically, not just as some distant HR succession planning exercise.
I began transferring knowledge, expanding responsibility, creating visibility, letting him lead things that I had historically exclusively led, making sure important relationships didn't live only with me, making sure that processes didn't live exclusively in my head, making sure the success of the program was increasingly attached to the program itself and the institution rather than just to me individually. I was in essence working myself out of a job.
Now, I want to be careful here because I don't want to romanticize how easy this is. It's not at all. And there are absolutely risks to doing this. There can be career consequences to making yourself highly replaceable. Organizations don't always reward the person who builds capacity underneath themselves. Sometimes indispensable people actually enjoy more short term security.
Than leaders who distribute knowledge and authority. There is an entire conversation that we could have about organizational incentives, career self-protection, and the very real tension between developing others and protecting your own self-interests. That may be another episode, but none of that changes what I believe about the leadership imperative itself. I would do it again. I would choose it again because I believed it was right for the program and I believed it was right for the person I was developing.
And perhaps most importantly, I knew myself well enough to recognize that the next season of work required something different than the season that I had been uniquely equipped to lead. Here is where succession planning gets real. Many leaders say that they want to develop other people, but developing people eventually requires giving something away, or many things away: authority, visibility, relationships, decisions, opportunities.
Credit, sometimes even the role itself. And that's where leadership development stops being philosophical and becomes personal. Because a lot of us have absorbed the idea that being needed is evidence of being valuable. If everyone comes to me for the answer, I must be important. If the meeting can't happen without me, I must be important. If the client only trusts me, I must be important.
If I am the only person who knows how this works, I must be important. And in the short term, that can feel incredibly validating. But dependency and leadership are not the same thing. In fact, if everything depends on you, there is a very good chance that you've created a bottleneck. If your team can't move until you move, or they can't decide until you decide.
Or they can't stretch because you're holding the work, they can't become capable because you keep proving your own capability. And eventually, the very thing that makes you feel valuable becomes the thing that limits everyone around you. I sometimes describe leadership growth as moving from doer to leader to developer to capacity builder. Early in our careers, we are rewarded for what we can personally accomplish.
We solve, we execute, we produce. and that competence is often exactly what gets us promoted. But leadership eventually requires a different skill or question. Not what can I accomplish, but what can happen because I developed someone else who can accomplish it. That's a profound shift.
And it can be uncomfortable because many of the things that made us successful early in our careers are the very things we eventually have to loosen our grip on. Expertise, control, being the fixer, being the answer person, being the person everybody needs. There is a very intoxicating dopamine hit that comes from being needed. Someone has a problem, you solve it. Someone asks a question, you know the answer. Something breaks, you fix it.
It feels productive and it feels useful. And sometimes it feels a whole lot easier than watching someone else learn how to do it. Developing people is slower. They will need coaching. They will make mistakes. Developing people can be frustrating. They will do things differently than you. They will occasionally make decisions you wouldn't have made. And perhaps most difficult of all, developing people can be humbling.
Because they may eventually become very, very, very good at something that used to make you special. This is where self-awareness becomes indispensable. Because if your identity depends on you being the most capable person in the room, you may struggle to build capability around you. If your worth depends on everyone needing you, you might unconsciously keep people dependent. If your security depends on being the only person who can do the job,
Succession will always feel threatening. But leadership cannot merely be about preserving your own usefulness. At some point, you have to ask whether you are building something stronger than yourself. So let me give you three practical questions. But before we move into those questions, a quick note: if succession planning or career development needs are front-of-mind considerations in your journey, I would love to invite you to join me for the next Growth Edge Leadership Masterclass.
This is the third cohort of my signature program for established and rising healthcare leaders who want to be more intentional about how they lead and how they continue to grow. It begins February 17th, includes six interactive teaching sessions and three one-on-one executive coaching sessions, and delivers 12 hours of accredited CE. We'll focus on strengthening your executive presence and influence, building strategic relationships and visibility, navigating complexity.
And being more intentional about your career trajectory. Early bird pricing is available now through November 30th, and you can learn more at lauriebaedke dot com slash masterclass. Now let's come back to those three questions worth asking. The first is, what still depends on you that should not? Think about your current role. Is there a meeting that only you lead? A relationship that only you hold? A process that exists largely in your head? A decision nobody feels empowered to make without you.
Or a responsibility you have simply continued carrying because you've always carried it? Pick one, not 10, just one, and ask yourself what it would take for someone else to confidently own it. The second question is: who are you intentionally making more capable or offering opportunities to? Not helping every once in a while, not mentoring occasionally, not just cheering for, developing. Whose judgment are you strengthening? Whose visibility are you increasing?
Who are you inviting into rooms they've not yet occupied? Who are you allowing to lead while you resist the urge to jump in and rescue? There is a wonderful coaching question I often recommend that leaders use when their direct reports or team members come to them for guidance. And it's this: if I weren't here, what would you do? Ask that question and then just be quiet. Let the person think. Let them reason or wrestle with it. Let them practice. Because every time you immediately provide the answer,
You strengthen their dependence on you. And every time you coach them toward their own answer, you strengthen their capacity. And the third question is probably the hardest. What are you afraid will happen if people need you less? That question may uncover something important. Maybe you worry you'll lose relevance. Maybe you worry someone else will get the credit. Maybe you worry your role will become less secure. Maybe being the expert has become a part of your identity.
Maybe you've never really considered what comes after this role. Those are legitimate concerns. Leadership does not require pretending that self-interest doesn't exist. But self-awareness requires noticing when self-protection begins shaping how much opportunity we allow other people to have. And there is one more part of my own story that matters here. Working myself out of that role did create space for what came next. New work, new ideas, new contributions.
Things I couldn't see fully while I was holding tightly to the thing that I had built. That will not always happen neatly, and I can assure you that I was not perfectly graceful throughout every step or stage of this succession journey I'm describing today. Nor would I ever promise someone that making themselves replaceable automatically leads to a perfect next opportunity. Careers are rarely that tidy, but I do believe this.
You cannot keep becoming if you refuse to release anything you've already mastered. Growth requires letting go of work, of authority, sometimes even of the reassuring feeling of being the person everybody needs. When I look back at the executive MBA program, I am so proud of what I helped build. But I am equally proud that I didn't build something that required me forever. Because the goal was never to make myself indispensable.
The goal was to build something impactful and to develop people capable of carrying it forward. So maybe the question is not, how valuable am I if they can succeed without me? Maybe the better question is, what kind of leader have I been if they can't? This week, identify one thing that still depends on you and think about how you might begin transferring it. Teach it, delegate it, coach somebody through it.
Let somebody else become good at something you are already good at. Because one of the most powerful things a leader can build is not dependence. It's capacity.
