Building for the Day You Leave- Intro Series #7

Over the course of my career I have been involved in many infrastructure projects and business building exercises. Each time we were constructing the infrastructure that would allow us to do more work, which would require more infrastructure, in a cycle that seemed to have no natural endpoint. Somewhere in the middle of that expansion, I started asking a question I didn't have a fully formed answer to at the time: what happens to all of this when I'm not here? The answer that allows for the best outcome for everyone is simple: I shouldn't need to be here.

It's not the kind of question that gets asked enough in the construction phase. When you're building something, the natural orientation is forward: the next capability, the next hire, the next strategic expansion. The question of the organization's independence from its builder feels abstract, even slightly defeatist. You're here now. The platform needs what it needs now.

But I've come to believe that the question of what happens when you leave should be present from the beginning, not as a constant preoccupation but as a design principle. Because how you build something is inseparable from whether it will stand on its own. The difference between organizations that outlast their founders and ones that fragment is almost always traceable to whether this question was part of the original thinking.

The best thing I can do for any client is make myself progressively unnecessary.

The same principle applies to advisory and coaching engagements, and it's the one I feel most strongly about in my own work. Not by withholding or keeping expertise proprietary, but by transferring genuine capability, building internal strength, and helping people develop the judgment and confidence to handle tomorrow's version of today's problem without needing to call me.

The same principle applies to every advisory engagement.

I'm aware this is an unusual orientation for a professional services practice. The conventional wisdom runs in the opposite direction: create dependency, become embedded, make yourself hard to exit. I find that orientation corrosive to the client relationship and to the quality of the work itself.

When an engagement is structured around genuine progress, when both parties are measuring success by the client's growing independence rather than by the continuation of the relationship, the work is different. More honest. More willing to go into difficult territory. The client isn't managing their advisor's feelings about the engagement ending. The dynamic is clean in a way that allows both people to be fully present to what actually needs to happen.

This applies to coaching in a particularly direct way.

The core of good coaching, as I understand and practice it, is that the coach is always in service of the coachee's growing capacity to lead their own thinking, not their growing attachment to the coaching relationship. Every session should leave the person more capable of the next conversation with themselves.

The teams I worked alongside over those years have grown into capabilities I couldn't have predicted. That, more than any individual contribution, is the thing I'm most proud of. The day I left each of those engagements mattered because of what was there when I walked out the door. Building for that day, from the very beginning, is the whole point.