The Leaders You Grow Outlast the Systems You Build

IT executive and advisor CIO Eduard de Vries Sands explains that developing leaders is a discipline, not a happy accident. He argues that giving people room to learn through failure is what turns capable managers into those who run their own functions.

Some of the most valuable work I have done as a leader was work that I refused to do myself. I gave it away.

The systems I built early in my career are mostly gone. The ERP got replaced. The migration everyone lost sleep over is a footnote. What remains is the people I gave that work to. Four of them run their own functions now, and two carry titles I once held.

Developing the people who outlast the work is the part of the CIO job that compounds, and it rarely happens by design. Producing leaders gets treated as a happy accident, the kind of thing a decent boss stumbles into. I argue that it is a discipline, and—like most disciplines—it costs something up front. To build the people under you, you have to hand them the work that makes you look indispensable.

Most executives flinch at that, and I understand why. The interesting problems are the ones that get you noticed. Giving them away feels like giving away your own standing. So, the work stays on your desk, the organization runs at the speed of one person, and the talented people below you wait for room that never opens.

I learned to do the opposite, and to be clear about why.

Leave the room, stay in the building

I try to leave white space—gaps I could fill myself and deliberately don't. When a capable person reports to me, I hold back from filling every one, and I let them fill it instead. I don’t ask them to take on the whole job at once, and I never let them operate without a net. Instead, I offer them a bounded piece of real work, with real stakes, where the outcome is theirs—and I am close enough to catch it if it falls.

That last part matters, because leaving space and walking away are two different things. The latter is abandonment. What I am describing is the opposite of absence. I stay in their work. I just avoid doing it for them. That distinction is the whole game. A leader who hovers produces people who cannot make a move without asking first. A leader who just disappears produces wreckage. The room in between, with gaps watched but not filled, is where people actually grow.

The hard part is staying quiet

I once gave a manager who had always executed my decisions well a program scoping decision that was genuinely hers to make—one where I would have gone a different way. She chose her path. I stayed quiet. It worked, and something shifted in a way that no amount of coaching from me would have produced. She stopped being someone who ran my plays and started being someone who called her own. The next assignment I gave her was a bigger stretch because she had earned it.

I will admit something that took me years to say out loud: letting go scares me every time. When I hand over a real decision and then sit on my hands, there is a stretch where I do not know if it will hold, and the not knowing never fully goes away. I do it anyway, because the pattern has played out to positive effect too many times to ignore. When you trust people, and they know it, they almost always pay you back.

Staying quiet is the hard part. Every time I think I know how to do something better, I make myself weigh what it would cost me if I step in against the cost of letting things play out on their own. Often the honest answer is that letting someone recover from a mistake is worth more than my correction, because the detour is where the learning happens. My tolerance for low effort is low. My tolerance for a motivated person getting it wrong on the way up is close to infinite.

What keeps this approach from being reckless is that I always look hard at the downside first. I let people get small and medium things wrong on purpose. I do not let the wrong thing be the one that takes down the quarter. Give people plenty of room but keep a limit on how big the failure could get. 

When the space is bigger than the person

This doesn’t always work, and the failures teach you more than the wins.

I once put a senior manager of data in charge of an outside partner running a major system migration. She owned the outcome—the one name on the wall for whether it landed. But managing a vendor and answering to a steering committee with my CEO on it was above her abilities, and I misjudged that. She trusted the partner longer than she should have, taking their status reports at face value instead of checking the work behind them. By the time we saw we weren't ready, the runway was gone. We pushed the go-live back a month.

The gap was hers to own in the moment, but the misread was mine. I had left more space than she was ready to handle. And I had not stayed close enough to the vendor relationship to catch the drift early.

So, I stepped in. I defended her to the steering committee, took the heat for the delay myself, and moved the date rather than let her take the fall. We continued the work and went live a month later. She kept the relationship, and she never took a vendor's word without verifying it again.

That is the difference between leaving room and abandoning someone. The net was there when she fell, and the fall told me exactly where she needed to improve. That is information you cannot get any other way. The next stretch goal I gave that data leader was calibrated to what I had learned, and she aced it. She now is a successful VP of analytics at another organization.

The space comes back to you

I gave the work away. The payoff came back to me as time.

That freed capacity turned out to be the most valuable thing I owned, because it could be spent on the things only I could do. When a major acquisition came up, I had the room to run real diligence—the kind that takes weeks and full attention rather than stolen evenings. Though we did not end up closing the deal, I was available for all that due diligence work because I had built an organization that did not need me in every room.

My CEO said something afterward that stuck with me. He said I was the only direct report who could make time for the high-value needs when they arose. He did not mean I worked more hours. He meant the opposite. I had built in the slack on purpose, and I was there when the company needed me.

Developing your people is not charity that costs you. It hands you back the one thing you can never make more of—your own attention—and puts it on the work that actually needs you in the room.

What the org chart does not show

The chart tells you who reports to you today. It does not tell you what actually matters: the boxes on other companies' charts that you quietly filled by refusing to be the ceiling. Over the years, I have had individual contributors grow into leaders, and leaders into executives. One now runs software engineering at a Fortune 10 company. Another leads EMR implementations for the largest government health system in the country. In time, they will each make room for someone on their own team to grow.

If you run at the scale of your own hours, you are the limiting factor. Build people who run without you, and the limit is no longer you. The systems age out either way. The people you developed will keep going, in rooms you will never sit in, making calls you will never hear about.

It still scares me to hand over the work and wait. But the fear has been wrong far more often than it has been right. So, the question I would leave you with is simple: Who on your team should already be doing a piece of your job—and what exactly are you waiting for?