It’s Good to be a Fan of People

I’m an ideas person.

I immerse myself in interesting concepts or challenging problems within my domain of expertise. I can spend hours, sometimes days, lost in an idea. I enjoy figuring things out. And, for most of my career, that inclination has served me well.

When I wanted to get better at something, I studied it. I read books. I listened to podcasts. I sought out experts. I pulled apart concepts until I understood them well enough to apply them.

In short, I’ve always been a fan of ideas.

But as my responsibilities have grown as a leader, I’m beginning to realize something: The problems I face today are increasingly bigger than me. Many are beyond my ability to solve alone.

And, maybe more importantly, I’m not supposed to solve them alone.

That requires a different approach. Instead of only immersing myself in ideas, I need to become equally interested in people.

Your Value Changes as You Lead

Early in our careers, our value is largely determined by what we can personally accomplish.

We solve the problem.
We make the sale.
We develop the plan.
We get the job done.

Naturally, we become attached to that capability. Being the person who can figure it out becomes part of our identity.

Then we move into a leadership position and the equation begins to change. Our performance becomes less about what we personally produce and increasingly about what the people around us are capable of producing. Eventually, the very capability that made us valuable can become a limitation…We become the bottleneck.

This becomes a difficult transition for someone who enjoys being the “hero.”

Leadership requires us to shift from being the person who solves the problem to the person who develops others capable of solving it. And that can be difficult because our experience sometimes distorts how we see someone else’s capability. A colleague of mine once shared,

We often judge people on their first day based on our best day.

There’s a lot of truth in that. We compare someone’s developing capability with our mature capability. Of course we can complete certain tasks faster than someone who is still learning to do them.

We’re supposed to be better. We’ve had more repetitions.

This may be one of the harder parts of leadership. Sometimes people will take longer to solve a problem, or they’ll solve it differently than we would. Our instinct is to jump in: I wouldn’t do it that way.

Maybe not.
But that’s different from saying they’re wrong.

If the outcome is right, the standards are upheld, and the boundaries haven’t been violated, sometimes leadership means allowing someone else to find their own way.

The question isn’t whether they can do it exactly as we would. The better question is: Are they becoming better at doing it without us?

That changes the leader’s role. Instead of immediately providing answers, we start asking questions:

What do you think?
What are you seeing?
What alternatives have you considered?

Now we’re doing something more valuable than solving the problem. We’re developing the person solving it. That’s where being a fan of people matters.

Fans want to see what someone can do.
They notice growth.
They recognize strengths.
They appreciate the things another person can do that they cannot.

Great leaders should probably feel the same way about the people around them. They want people on their team who know things they don’t know, see things they don’t see, and can eventually do parts of their job better than they can.

That isn’t threatening…That’s the point of leadership.

Maybe that’s what it means to become a fan of people. It’s moving beyond seeing people for what they can do today and becoming genuinely interested in what they are capable of becoming. It means recognizing their strengths without needing to demonstrate our own. Giving them room to think, room to struggle, and room to surprise us.

For someone who has spent a career figuring things out and getting things done, that may be one of the harder lessons of leadership:

Sometimes the most valuable thing I can do isn’t to figure it out or get it done. It’s to recognize the person who can.

And maybe that’s the real shift: making it less about me and more about them. Taking a genuine interest in people, what they’re capable of, and helping them succeed. Because as a leader, their success becomes our success. And that’s why it’s good to be a fan of people.

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It’s Good to be a Fan of People was originally published in Horizon Performance on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.