For many high-achieving business leaders, one of the harder things to do is resist the urge to roll up your sleeves and pitch in when something goes wrong.

It could be a last-minute curveball that sends a presentation back to the drawing board or a sudden departure on your operations team that requires a reshuffling of roles. Either way, the urge to do rather than delegate, as Kellogg professor Leigh Thompson writes, “solves today’s problem—and creates tomorrow’s.”

This week, we share Thompson’s advice on how to avoid doing others’ jobs. And we share a fascinating deep dive by Kellogg’s David Schonthal into the principles that make Japanese product innovation so unique and successful. 

Whose job are you doing?

In a recent “Dear Professor” Substack post, Thompson addressed a common leadership trap: the tendency to step in and do other people’s work. This can leave leaders tied up with minutiae rather than free to lead. 

Thompson notes that avoiding delegation can also mean your team will start depending and stop stretching—and that you will stop growing as a leader.

“In my book, Stop Spending, Start Managing (with Tanya Menon), we show how leaders “spend” their own time, energy, and effort to solve problems their teams should own. It feels productive—even responsible. But it’s a trap. The more you spend, the less your team grows—and the more indispensable (and overloaded) you become,” Thompson writes.

Leaders should be clear about how they intend to lead—by defining their leadership style and communicating it to their teams. 

“Silence creates confusion,” she writes. “Clarity creates respect, motivation, and alignment.”  

They should also break the habit of intervening when they see something going wrong. This can be hard for leaders who are highly capable and hard-wired to execute. But creating a structure for the team to be proactive and intervene themselves when they spot issues gives contributors the room to operate and fix problems without the leader getting caught in the weeds.

To make the structure for the team clear and explicit, Thompson recommends building a team charter that identifies roles and responsibilities, decision-making procedures, and communication expectations.

“Build the charter with your team,” Thompson writes. “If you want empowerment and accountability, they have to co-create the rules of engagement. Otherwise, it’s not a charter—it’s a mandate.”

Read more at Dear Professor.  

Innovating? Look to Japan’s breakout product developers

Business leaders are often tasked with developing and guiding a company’s strategies for product innovation. Kellogg’s David Schonthal and his colleague Matt Alt, writing in Harvard Business Review, look to Japan’s breakout commercial hits for inspiration. In the process, they identify five principles that can help any company with the adoption of innovative new products.

So what does the development of the Walkman, the Game Boy, and Dragon Ball teach us about innovation today?

“It demonstrates how consumers inevitably pick convenience over specifications, how smart companies know when to follow the customer’s lead, and how groundbreaking innovation can only emerge from thinking counterintuitively,” they write. 

But Western product development models often proceed from a different set of assumptions: “Identify a market opportunity, engineer the best solution, pack it with features, and launch with maximum fanfare.” 

This process often leads to products that are larded up with rarely used features, where an unimposing simplicity might draw curious new users. 

Schonthal and Alt note that Japanese designers are also noted for being responsive to how users adopt a product and then iterating to improve on those unanticipated use cases.

“Every product contains possibilities its creator never foresaw,” they write, “but only the creators humble enough to watch how people actually use it, rather than how they were supposed to, ever find out what those possibilities are.”

Read more at Harvard Business Review.