As people become more senior, their role naturally changes.
They take on more responsibility, lead larger teams, influence wider decisions and spend more time thinking about the direction of the business.
But there is an interesting question that sits underneath that progression:
How hands-on should a senior leader actually be?
It comes up regularly in conversations we have with both candidates and hiring leaders.
Some businesses want senior people who are still close to the craft and technically credible with the teams they lead. Others are actively trying to free their senior people from day-to-day delivery because they need their time focused elsewhere.
Both can be right.
The challenge is finding the balance.
Technical credibility still matters
Recently, an experienced Creative Lead spoke to us about the importance of staying connected to the work as their career developed.
They did not believe a senior leader needed to be the person personally delivering every piece of work, but retaining a strong technical understanding made them a better leader.
It meant they could have more useful conversations with their team, understand why something was difficult and make better judgements about what was realistically achievable.
Interestingly, we heard something very similar from a client recruiting someone to lead a multidisciplinary design and technology team.
The successful person would inherit people with different skills, experience levels and established ways of working. The client wanted somebody who could bring those people together and challenge the team to work differently.
Their phrase was that the new leader needed to be “cut from the same cloth.”
Not because they needed to prove they could do everybody else’s job better.
They needed enough understanding of the work to challenge it credibly.
But being too hands-on can become part of the problem
We also see the opposite.
Senior people remain so involved in day-to-day delivery that they have little room left to actually lead.
In one example, a business was recruiting a senior designer specifically to create capacity above the role.
Senior creative leaders were still designing, managing clients and remaining deeply involved in delivery.
They were very good at it.
That was part of the problem.
The business increasingly needed their experience focused on leadership, commercial decisions, developing the team and creating new opportunities.
The new hire was not simply being recruited because there was more work.
They were being hired so the people above them could stop doing work that no longer needed to sit with them.
Being indispensable is not always a good thing
Versatility is enormously valuable in a growing business.
People naturally wear several hats. They sell, deliver, solve problems, manage clients and step into whatever needs doing.
Those people often become some of the most valuable individuals in the organisation.
But eventually that versatility can become a bottleneck.
If the person responsible for finding the next opportunity is continually pulled back into delivering the last one, growth becomes harder.
If a creative director still needs to personally rescue every difficult project, the team never fully develops the confidence to solve those problems themselves.
If a senior account leader remains involved in every important client conversation, the people underneath them do not get the opportunity to build those relationships.
At some point, the very thing that made somebody indispensable can become the thing the business needs them to let go of.
Leadership does not mean losing touch
The answer is not for senior leaders to completely detach themselves from the work.
That creates a different problem.
A leader who no longer understands the reality of delivery may underestimate how long something takes, set unrealistic expectations or lose credibility with experienced specialists.
Their expertise still matters.
The difference is how they use it.
As people progress, their experience should increasingly help them recognise good work, ask better questions, challenge decisions and support other people to solve problems themselves.
Their value becomes less about personally producing the answer and more about improving the quality of the answers produced around them.
Letting go is often the hardest part
For an experienced leader, stepping in can feel efficient.
They know they could complete the task more quickly. They may know exactly how they would solve the problem or handle the client conversation.
Sometimes stepping in is necessary.
Doing it every time is not.
Effective leadership requires giving other people genuine ownership, even when they approach the work differently.
That can mean resisting the urge to fix something immediately. It can mean allowing somebody to make a decision you would not have made yourself.
And sometimes it means accepting that another person may eventually become better at part of the job than the leader who originally taught them.
That is not a loss of value.
It is one of the clearest signs that the team is developing.
What does this mean when hiring a senior leader?
This balance is worth thinking about before a senior vacancy goes to market.
A business should be clear about what it genuinely needs from the person.
Do they need to remain actively involved in delivery, or is their main job to develop the people doing it?
How important is technical credibility with the existing team?
Which responsibilities should they continue to own personally?
Which responsibilities should they be expected to delegate?
And perhaps most importantly:
What does the business need this person to spend more time doing six or twelve months from now?
A role can quickly become confused when the business wants someone to be a strategic leader while still expecting them to carry a full individual workload.
Being clear about that balance helps attract the right candidates and gives the eventual hire a much stronger chance of succeeding.
Close enough to understand. Far enough away to lead.
So, how hands-on should a senior leader really be?
Close enough to understand the work.
Close enough to challenge it.
And close enough to maintain credibility with the people doing it.
But far enough away to give those people genuine ownership.
Seniority is not necessarily about becoming less hands-on.
It is about becoming less operationally necessary.
One of the clearest signs of successful leadership is when work that once depended heavily on one person can continue to happen brilliantly without them.
Hiring a senior or leadership role? We are always happy to talk through what the position really needs to achieve, how hands-on the person should be and what that means for the type of candidate you take to market.
