There is a phrase I have caught myself saying a lot over the years.

“I can just do it.”

And the frustrating thing is, most of the time, I can.

I can send the email. Fix the spreadsheet. Answer the question. Write the report. Solve the registration problem. Track down the missing information. Pack the boxes. Make the phone call. If something needs to get done, I can usually figure out how to do it.

Sometimes it is even faster to do it myself than to explain it to someone else.

For a long time, I think I considered that one of my strengths as a leader.

Lately, I am not so sure.

Girls on the Run Piedmont started in 2013, and I have been here almost from the beginning. Like most small nonprofits, especially in those early years, there wasn't much distinction between “executive director” and “person who does whatever needs to be done.”

So I learned.

I learned registration systems and budgets and grants and coach training and fundraising and event planning. I learned how many boxes can fit in the back of my car. I learned that “other duties as assigned” is a particularly entertaining phrase when there isn't actually anyone above you doing the assigning.

When there was a gap, I filled it. When I didn't know how to do something, I learned. When there was a problem, I figured it out.

And for a long time, that worked.

Except the organization kept growing.

There are hundreds of girls now. Dozens of teams. Coaches and schools and sponsors and donors and grants and events. There are staff members doing work that once lived almost entirely inside my head. There are more people to serve, more relationships to maintain and more opportunities than there were when we started.

At some point, “I can just do it” stopped being a solution.

It became part of the problem.

A coach once challenged me with a question I keep coming back to:

“It isn't about what you can do. It's about what you should do.”

I didn't particularly like that question.

Because I can do a lot of things at Girls on the Run Piedmont. After thirteen years, I have done nearly all of them at one point or another. I can train coaches, troubleshoot registration, write a grant, pack team supplies, answer parent emails, work on a budget and plan a 5K.

I can probably also tell you which bin in the storage unit contains the thing you're looking for.

Actually, that's a lie.

I can tell you that I definitely ordered it, I remember seeing it somewhere, and we should check the storage unit, the trailer, my garage and possibly Katie's car.

The question isn't whether I can.

It's whether I should.

And if I follow that question far enough, I eventually get to one I like even less.

Who am I if they don't need me?

There it is.

I have spent thirteen years helping build this organization. In the early days, being a good leader often meant being willing to do whatever needed to be done. Being needed meant I was useful. And somewhere along the way, I think being useful got a little tangled up with being valuable.

That's harder to let go of than a task list.

I am also Type A enough to have opinions about things most reasonable people would never consider having opinions about. Handing pieces of this organization to someone else can feel a little like handing someone your baby and saying, “Here you go. I've written down the important stuff. You'll be fine.”

And then standing three feet away.

Watching.

Casually.

Definitely not hovering.

“Are you sure you want to hold her like that?”

I can laugh at that because I recognize it now. But underneath the joke is something I am still trying to figure out.

I genuinely want the people around me to grow. This season, I have been intentionally asking Katie and Kelsey to step into larger roles. Katie has been with Girls on the Run Piedmont for several years now, and there are parts of our program she knows better than I do. Kelsey's role continues to grow, too, as she takes on pieces of grants, reporting, development and community relationships that I have held closely for years.

I don't want to simply take things off my list and put them onto theirs.

I want them to lead.

And apparently, wanting other people to lead and actually making room for them to lead are two different things.

I haven't always done that particularly well.

I have handed something off and then taken it back because doing it myself was faster. I have given someone responsibility without realizing how much of the information needed to do it was still living only in my head.

Apparently, “Kathy knows this because something similar happened in 2017” is not an effective organizational filing system.

Neither is, “Here are parts A, C, D, E and G. You’re good to go.”

What do you mean you're confused?

It turns out that when you have been doing something for years, you can forget how much you know simply because you've been doing it for years. The connections seem obvious to me because I was there when they were made. That doesn't mean I have actually explained them to anyone else.

I have jumped in to solve a problem before giving someone else enough time to solve it. And I have definitely said, “I'll just take care of it,” when what I probably needed to do was have a conversation.

None of those things felt like leadership mistakes at the time.

Most of them felt efficient.

That's what makes this tricky.

When you are good at getting things done, getting things done can become the way you solve almost everything.

Developing people is slower. It requires explanation and repetition. It requires clear expectations and sometimes uncomfortable conversations. It requires letting someone take a route you would not have chosen.

Which is slightly inconvenient when you are a Type A person who would prefer that everyone grow and develop beautifully, without anything actually going wrong, while also doing everything EXACTLY the way you would have done it.

Very reasonable expectations, really.

There is some irony here, too.

I recently stood in front of a room of teenagers and talked about making mistakes. Through Girls on the Run, we teach girls to try, struggle, learn, adjust and try again.

I believe that completely.

And yet I am discovering how much harder it is to practice when I am the one who has to loosen my grip. Sometimes growth means allowing someone to approach something differently than I would. Sometimes it means letting an idea develop before I jump in with my own. And sometimes it means recognizing that “not the way I would do it” is not the same thing as “wrong.”

I feel like Type A people should receive some sort of wallet-sized card with that printed on it.

The lessons are always easier to teach than they are to live.

I am learning that there is a space between doing something myself and simply letting it go.

That space is coaching.

And I am not always as comfortable there as I am just getting the thing done.

Coaching means being clear about what matters. It means giving someone the context she needs instead of assuming she somehow absorbed thirteen years of organizational history by standing near me. It means speaking up when something isn't working. It means asking questions instead of immediately providing answers.

And then it means resisting the urge to grab the thing back.

I am working on that last part.

There is another piece of this I am still sorting through, because making room doesn't mean I suddenly don't want to know what is happening.

I do.

I want to know what is happening, when it's happening and why we're doing it. I want to understand the decisions being made in an organization I have spent thirteen years helping to build.

Part of that is my job.

And part of it, if we're being truthful, is probably my ego.

The challenge is figuring out where one ends and the other begins.

I am still the Executive Director. I am responsible for the direction of this organization. Stepping out of the middle of every task doesn't mean I stop paying attention to where we're going.

But I am beginning to understand that there is a difference between knowing what is happening and needing to be the person making it happen.

There is a difference between oversight and ownership.

Sometimes I ask for an update because I genuinely need the information. Sometimes I ask because I am coaching.

And sometimes I ask because no one has updated the spreadsheet and apparently my inner peace is more closely tied to spreadsheet accuracy than I would like to admit.  Yes, it woke me up in the middle of the night, don't judge me.

I'm working on that, too.

Life has made all of this somewhat less theoretical lately.

There are only so many hours in a day, and mine belong to a lot of different things right now. I am homeschooling. I am helping care for my husband. We are in the middle of a Girls on the Run season, raising money so that a family's ability to pay never determines whether their girl can participate and preparing to bring about a thousand people together for our fall 5K.

And later this month, I will step onto a TEDx stage.

No one else can practice that talk for me. No one else can stand on that stage for me.

Preparing for it has forced me to look a little harder at all the things I am still doing that someone else can do.

Not because those things don't matter. Because they do.

But maybe my job isn't to prove that I can carry all of them.

Maybe the next stage of leadership is figuring out which things are actually mine to carry.

I don't think the goal is to become unnecessary.

I think the goal is to become necessary for the right things.

To set direction. To protect the mission. To develop people. To build relationships. To think about what is coming next instead of spending all of my time solving what is directly in front of me.

And maybe, eventually, to build an organization strong enough that sometimes something gets handled beautifully and nobody thinks, “We should probably ask Kathy.”

Eventually.

I'm not ready for that yet.

I would like to be the kind of evolved leader who can tell you that the idea fills me with pride.

At the moment, it mostly makes me want to ask, “Wait. Why aren't we asking Kathy?”

So, clearly, there is still some work to do.

Ask me again in another thirteen years.

For now, I am trying to replace one question with another.

Not, “Can I do this?”

I probably can.

But should I?

Sometimes the answer will still be yes.

And sometimes, I am learning, the best thing I can do for something I have spent thirteen years building is make enough room for someone else to step in.

Even if I'm still standing three feet away.

Casually.

Definitely not hovering.