There is a man in your orbit who is watching you. A kid, a younger brother, a guy on your crew who is nineteen and pretending he has it handled. He will never mention it, and he is taking notes on exactly one thing, which is how you behave when it goes badly.
Not your good week. Anybody can do a good week.
This is the part of leadership nobody prepares a man for. Authority arrives before competence does, usually by accident, and suddenly other people’s mortgages run through decisions you make on a Tuesday afternoon with incomplete information and no one to check your work.
Three things I have watched cost men their teams.
The conversation they would not have. There is always one, and every month it goes unhad it gets more expensive, and eventually it costs the person it was about. Avoiding a hard conversation is not kindness. It is a loan against somebody else’s future taken out in your name.
Wanting to be liked. It is the fastest way to lose a room. Men can tell the difference between a leader who cares about them and a leader who needs them to approve of him, and the second one gets managed rather than followed.
Delegation that is actually abandonment. Handing off a job without handing off the authority to do it is a trap, and everybody but the man who set it can see that.
The harder leadership is at home, and almost nobody writes about it. A crew can quit. A wife and a son cannot, which means the standard is higher and the accountability is thinner.
You were made into something in order to make others. A man who builds a life that serves only himself has built a smaller thing than he was capable of, and he tends to find that out late.
This is drawn from Carry the Weight.