Take Out the Garbage: Avoid Leadership Bypassing

If you’re moving toward a leadership position, new to a leadership position, or if you find yourself in a functional dead-space in middle management, here’s a tip: one of your primary responsibilities leading a team is to deal with the hard stuff that your team has bubbling up before it gets to the higher levels of leadership!

This is not a revolutionary concept, but it’s still fairly common in more ineffective leadership environments to see team leaders and managers do a pass-through with difficult issues. An example of what this can look like: my team member has an angry customer due to a mistake on the company’s part, and instead of handling it, I log it, absolve myself of the responsibility to address it, and hand it up directly to my own manager or leader to address or solve. We do this reflexively—most of us are not built for conflict and we don’t enjoy hearing people (either customers or employees) yell at us for a mistake someone else in our company made, so we think to ourselves, “this is above my pay grade, I’m sending this up for them to deal with.”

But the better response in this situation is to pause and remember: one of the primary responsibilities of a team leader is to address issues and prevent them from going up the chain of command to the next leader if at all possible (there are obvious exceptions for legal, HR, and insurance-related issues that need to be escalated immediately to those departments, follow up immediately with your own manager if you have questions about if the issue falls into those categories). When you are a team leader, your responsibility is to lead. And that means dealing with the hard stuff head-on. It’s not fun, and it can be hard work. But it’s important for your team to know that you have their back and can do the hard things when necessary. It’s important for YOU to know that you absolutely have the capability of doing the hard things, and that’s why you’re the team leader! And it’s important for your manager to know that you can handle things, and keep additional work off of their plate so that they can focus on other parts of the business and their own work responsibilities.

Let me be clear: you absolutely should let your own manager know about the issue and what you did to address it—communication is always important to be able to prevent a similar situation in the future—but leading means that you do your best to resolve it in whatever way you have the power to do so, and pass along only what is necessary for process improvement and anything outside of your own ability to solve (and the exceptions listed above).

Flexing the muscles of problem-solving, de-escalation, and advocating for your team are important leadership traits and will only get stronger the more you use them. While it can be tempting to do the quick bypass of sending the harder things uphill, you will be a more effective leader and your career potential will be higher if you implement all these tactics regularly in your leadership role. Remember that you are capable and resourceful and you have the ability to develop, build, and use the skills to effectively handle the hard things in business!