Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?
Learning to let my go of my ego and trust...<p>Understanding that delegating tasks, instead of doing them myself, was of the utmost importance the more people I managed... especially, greenfield work. Literally: do not steal the fun. This also means inherently trusting people, and if you can&#x27;t do that you shouldn&#x27;t be working with them. two important notes about that:<p>1. If you just thought of someone you can&#x27;t trust instead of thinking about how <i>you</i> can give more trust to people, you just had your ego stand in the way of mutual success. You are a shitty manager, and today is hopefully the first day of you recognizing that and learning to trust.<p>2. When people don&#x27;t deliver what you expected, it&#x27;s because you did a shitty job of communicating it to them. What seems obvious to you after 45 minutes in a meeting with three other people already prepared for the topic will most of the time seem obvious to no one else. If it does, I can almost promise, their vision of it is totally different than yours.  Learning to work through the defining the problem (that includes asking &quot;does this problem exist?&quot;) and then guiding solutions (we have x days, engineering hours, etc available) to ensure they meet the needs of the business. If no one but you delivers things correctly, you&#x27;re a shitty manager, and today&#x27;s hopefully the first day of you recognizing you need to learn to communicate and trust.<p>Not many people are lucky enough to be told so plainly it&#x27;s their ego, but it&#x27;s your ego that causes your team to fail. Maybe it&#x27;s your boss&#x27;s ego that&#x27;s causing you to fail... I was told plainly to my face to not let my ego get in the way of the goal... and yeah it punched me in the gut too, so if you&#x27;re hurting, or in denial know it&#x27;s okay. We all have to grow, it&#x27;s worth it.