In today’s fast-changing world, leadership isn’t about having all the answers — it’s about creating the conditions where answers emerge. The best leaders aren’t the ones running every meeting, approving every document, or solving every issue. They’re the ones who build clarity, remove roadblocks, and unleash their teams to deliver their best work.

This shift represents a powerful evolution: from doing the work to enabling the work.

The best part about all the technology emerging and evolving is that technology can be the enabler of YOUR leadership! Think about what value you provide your organization. What is it that you bring to the table? What is that you can do (and even perhaps uniquely you)? Why did the organization hire you to be in the position you are in? Think about the work that adds the most value to your team, the organization, and those you serve. Those are the activities you should be doing.

Now look at your daily work and activity. Are you doing those activities?  How much of your day is spent on tedious tasks – emailing multiple times to coordinate a meeting, trying to find out what the status is, or struggling to articulate your ideas and visions? The leaders of tomorrow are asking not just how much of this work can be done by technology. The leaders of tomorrow are asking what can I do if I can automate or delegate most of my work – what value-adding activities can I focus on today if technology can handle daily operations?

Many leaders rose to the top because they were great at doing. They were the problem-solvers, the fixers, the firefighters. But as organizations face increasingly complex problems, this hands-on approach creates bottlenecks. The more leaders try to do it all, the more they unintentionally hold their teams back.

Stepping back isn’t about stepping away. It’s about focusing your time and attention where it matters most — on vision, strategy, and enabling others to lead. It is simply a shift in focus. You will see this when a great producing team member is promoted to management. The ones that succeed are the ones that stop doing the work that got them promoted and shift to performing those management duties. If you’re ever frustrated with someone who you know was a great team player but are lacking in their leadership roles, see if they are still focusing on the work that made them successful. As you rise in your position and responsibilities, so should your vision and daily activities. 

Two powerful strategies are helping modern leaders make this shift:

The shift in working environments has built up and expanded the reliance on technology to connect teams and individuals. And the advancement of technology has allowed us to be more connected than ever before. But how engaged are your teams when you come together in those small boxes of virtual meeting spaces? And now, many organizations are wrestling with the challenges of supporting those who prefer to be in person and co-located while also accommodating remote work from different time zones and even continents. Now it is not just being comfortable using the technologies, but about you being able to command your leadership skills through a world wide web. And so you have to advance your meeting skills from being able to simply run a good meeting to being able to create engagement and connection through all those electrons. And hybrid means you need to have EVERYONE feeling just as connected as those that are sitting next to each other. But again, the trick to this is the same thought – shift your focus and your activities to your leadership role.

Too often, leaders feel responsible for driving every conversation to a decision. But what if your superpower wasn’t having the best idea in the room… but creating the space where the best idea can emerge?

That’s what great facilitation does. Instead of telling people what to do, facilitation:

Another way leaders free themselves to focus on what only they can do is by letting technology handle the routine. Tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot can support everything from summarizing meeting notes to generating first drafts of strategies or presentations.

When leaders integrate AI effectively, they:

The challenge is that the AI-enabled leaders of tomorrow are asking today how much of their work can be automated. EVERY activity that you are doing daily, stop pause and ask if it can be automated. Your emails, your follow-ups, your status updates, and more. Is there technology now at our fingertips that could allow the “work” portion to be done so that you can focus on the leadership questions and vision work? But it is not how much of your work you can have AI do. It’s about what you do with the time you now have when your work can be delegated – whether to technology or even someone else. What leadership activities are you filling your time with? That’s the shift in focus here. It’s not about the AI right now. It’s about what AI is allowing you to do. Cause AI isn’t replacing leaders — it’s clearing their path to allow you to lead more effectively.

Every leader should pause and ask themselves:

This isn’t about working less — it’s about working at the right level. The level where your leadership makes the greatest impact. And that’s the thought that should drive every activity of your day. From should you attend a meeting or what questions you ask of your teams – are you driving the vision forward and enabling others to get the organization there?

The future belongs to leaders who elevate, not overwork. Who facilitate instead of dictate. Who leverage technology instead of fighting it.

When you let go of the need to do everything, you make room for your team — and your organization — to thrive.

The wave of change is here. You don’t have to swim against it. You can surf it.