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Being the leader everyone turns to can feel like a sign you’re doing something right.
You’re available, you know the answers and you step in when the team gets stuck.
But if work slows down every time you’re unavailable, that helpfulness may have created a different problem.
Phil Jewell, Founder of Impact Leadership & The Irrelevant Leader, shared with Tech Talent North why strong leadership sometimes means becoming less essential to your team’s day-to-day success.
Key takeaways:
- If every decision runs through the leader, the leader can become the bottleneck.
- Teams need space to take ownership, solve problems and build confidence without you.
- A useful test of leadership: how well can your team keep moving when you’re not there?
What Happens When You’re Not There?
Phil learned this lesson in an unusual way.
While preparing to deploy with the British Army, he expected his leadership assessment to involve 48 hours of being observed under pressure. Instead, his assessors sent him to a cabin and told him not to come out.
They spent the next 48 hours assessing his team.
How they made decisions, responded to challenges and operated without him would determine how successfully Phil had led them.
“How that team performed when I, the leader, wasn’t there, told them everything they needed to know about the leadership culture that I had created.”
The experience changed how Phil thought about leadership. If a team depends on its leader to keep work moving, that dependence can make it more vulnerable.
He compares it to traffic. When every decision has to pass through the leader, work hits a traffic light and stops. When decisions can move through the team, they operate more like a roundabout. Things may slow down but they keep moving.
That leaves leaders with a useful question:
“How well can the team you lead keep moving forward when you’re not there?”
The Accidental Micromanager
Most leaders don’t set out to micromanage.
Phil has informally asked around a thousand people whether they know a micromanager. More than 90% say yes. When he asks whether they are one, fewer than 10% raise their hands.
He thinks part of that gap comes down to a less obvious form of micromanagement.
The accidental micromanager isn’t necessarily controlling. They’re helpful.
Any problem? Come to me. Need an answer? Send me a message. Stuck on something? My door is always open.
Over time, the leader becomes the easiest route to an answer. The team gets fewer opportunities to work through uncertainty, make decisions and learn from mistakes.
“They won’t take ownership because you haven’t let go of it for them to take. You hold onto it yourself.”
For People leaders developing managers, that’s an important distinction. Supporting a team and solving its problems aren’t always the same thing.
Trust Has to Come Before Autonomy
Letting go requires trust, and Phil challenges the familiar idea that trust must first be earned.
His principle is simple: give trust on day one.
That doesn’t mean removing accountability or accepting unnecessary risk. It means questioning whether processes, approvals and management habits are helping people do good work or simply protecting against the possibility that somebody might get it wrong.
Phil argues that the consequences show up in how teams behave.
“Without trust, people check, second guess, play safe, and safe teams rarely innovate.”
That matters in tech organizations where teams are being asked to experiment, adapt and make decisions in an environment that keeps changing. Autonomy can’t exist only when somebody senior is available to approve it.
Stop Performing Leadership
Letting go also requires leaders to become comfortable without having every answer.
Phil learned that lesson early in his military career. Faced with leading people who had considerably more experience than he did, he tried to become the tough, authoritative leader he thought they expected.
His team noticed.
A colleague eventually told him that they no longer recognised the person they had initially respected and wanted to follow. Phil had become so focused on looking like a leader that he had moved away from how he wanted to lead.
His advice now is straightforward:
“Stop performing leadership. Bring yourself, your story, your values, your scars.”
As AI takes on more execution and teams navigate constant change, the distinctly human parts of leadership become harder to overlook. Judgement, self-awareness, trust and the ability to create confidence in others still sit with people.
Phil puts self-awareness at the centre of that.
“The human difference matters more now than ever.”
Try Closing Your Door
Phil leaves leaders with one practical challenge: make yourself a little less accessible.
For years, he proudly told his teams his door was always open. Eventually, he realised he had turned himself into what he calls the “easy button.”
People knew they could come to him for an answer, so they did.
Closing the door isn’t about withdrawing support. It’s about creating enough space for people to find an answer, make a judgement call or work through a problem before turning to the leader.
“Often our need to be needed as a leader is greater than a team’s need to actually need us.”
That can be uncomfortable. Being needed often becomes part of a leader’s identity, particularly when expertise is what got them promoted in the first place.
But developing capable people requires giving them room to become capable.
A Final Thought
At the end of Phil’s session, the conversation turned to a familiar habit in tech: checking Slack from the beach, answering emails on vacation and staying connected just in case the team needs something.
It can look like commitment. It can also be a sign that the team still relies too heavily on one person to keep things moving.
Becoming an “irrelevant leader” doesn’t mean becoming irrelevant to your people. It means building enough trust, capability and confidence that progress no longer depends on your constant presence.
Perhaps that’s a better test of leadership than how often your team needs you:
What happens when you’re not there?
Phil Jewell will bring The Irrelevant Leader to Tech Talent North, Western Edition in Vancouver on November 17, sharing how leaders can step back so their teams can step up.