The Most Powerful Leaders Know When to Step Back

A reflection from The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo

This is part of the "Meller Highlights" series with reflections from my personal book highlights.

One thing I’ve been trying to do every day is to pick one idea from my reading and think about how to actually apply it.

Not just understand it in theory, but find a way to live it a little.

Today’s highlight: Leading Change by John P. Kotter

“At higher levels of management, the job starts to converge regardless of background. Success becomes more and more about mastering a few key skills: hiring exceptional leaders, building self-reliant teams, establishing a clear vision, and communicating well.”

There’s a moment in your career when things start to click differently.

In the early years, your work is often about proving yourself, getting better at your craft, and being dependable.

However, as you transition into management (if that is your goal), and especially when you reach higher levels of leadership, the pressure to be everywhere and do everything begins to shift.

The job becomes less about your specific background and more about a few core things that always matter, no matter where you started.

Can you attract and support people who are smarter than you in key areas?

Can you build a team that runs without you constantly checking in?

Can you help everyone see the direction clearly enough that they can make decisions on their own?

Can you communicate in a way that makes people feel safe, aligned, and ready to act?

That’s what leadership slowly distills down to. The noise fades, and these questions stay.

It’s not always obvious at first. Many of us enter management still focused on doing. We stay too close to the work because it’s comfortable. We jump into the weeds because it feels useful. But over time, that doesn’t scale.

If everything still depends on you, you're not leading, you’re just acting as a smarter individual contributor with a fancier title.

The hard part is learning to step back without disappearing. You’re still present, still active, but your impact shifts from decisions to direction, from tasks to clarity, from solving to building people who solve.

It’s also humbling. When you do it right, your team becomes more independent. You might feel less needed, less central, maybe even a bit invisible. But that’s the point.

The best leaders I’ve worked with were never the loudest in the room. They weren’t involved in everything. But you could feel their presence in how the team moved, in the way people made decisions confidently, in how work flowed with less friction.

If you're stepping into a higher leadership role, this might be the hardest shift to make. And maybe the most important.

Start measuring your success not by how much you do, but by how much your team grows without you in the middle. Stop trying to prove you're essential and focus on building something that works even when you're away.

Have you felt this shift yourself? Maybe caught yourself holding on too tightly or slowly learning to let go? If you’ve seen this play out, on your own path or through someone else’s leadership, I’d love to hear how it shaped you.

This is your daily tip, inspired by one of my highlights from The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo.

If reflections like this help you grow with a little more intention and a little less noise, subscribe to Meller Notes. One quiet shift at a time, we figure this out.

This is a free and open article, so I want to check… Was this reading worth a cup of coffee?