Your Team Doesn't Need You As Much As You Think

I have a tendency to treat my team like little fragile birds. I have to protect and nurture them until they’re ready to leave the nest. I want to make sure no harm ever comes to them and they don’t ever have to be uncomfortable.

With my amazing tutelage, real world examples, experience answering questions I nicely reword for them, they will soon grow up to be strong, smart, sophisticated analysts who can handle any problem with ease.

Unfortunately, there’s a rather large hole in my approach.

It’s bollocks.

I was reflecting on this a few months ago and I realized when I was a young, wide-eyed analyst, I got exposed to things. I was put in rooms that challenged me. When my data was wrong, the stakeholders came to me with questions, and if they CC’d my boss it was because they’d already emailed me about it, and it was about time I dealt with it!

It’s how I learned the business. It’s how I learned what was important. It’s how I learned to prioritize work, and how important relationships were. How to float ideas without floating ideas.

It’s how I developed my own style.

By protecting people from that - because I like them and don’t want to make them uncomfortable - I’m robbing them of valuable experience that shaped who I am.

Ironically, by shielding them from this I’m both creating more work for myself… in more than one way:

• I become the go-between, which takes time and makes me a bottleneck.

• My team doesn’t have the context to solve problems by themselves, so I have to step in.

Anyway, we talked about this at my team meeting a few weeks ago, and it was clear that I need to do more to expose my team to difficult situations.

So what do I need to do differently?

Let Them Own the Relationship

Stop being the intermediary. When a stakeholder has a question about someone’s work, let them answer it directly.

Introduce them to stakeholders, make sure they have the context, then step back. Be available for support, but don’t jump in unless they actually need you.

Your junior analyst can handle a conversation about why the numbers changed. They might stumble. That’s how they get better.

Put Them in Rooms They’re Not Ready For

Invite your team to strategy meetings and executive updates, even if they’re “not ready yet.” Brief them beforehand, but let them be in the room.

They need to hear how business decisions get made, what questions executives ask, and what matters to leadership. You can’t teach this by filtering everything through your own lens.

Let Them Feel the Consequences

When someone’s analysis has an error, let the stakeholder come to them with questions. Don’t intercept the email. Don’t reword it to make it gentler.

Obviously, step in if a stakeholder is being unreasonable, but most of the time, they can handle more than you think.

The sting of delivering bad data teaches attention to detail and ownership in a way that your careful feedback never will.

Stop Rewording Their Questions

When your team comes to you with a poorly framed stakeholder request, don’t translate it for them.

Send them back to clarify: “I’m not sure I understand what decision you’re trying to make. Can we talk through what you need?”

If you always do this translation, they’ll never develop the skill themselves.

Give Them Problems, Not Solutions

When something goes wrong, resist the urge to tell them exactly how to approach it.

Ask: “What do you think we should do?” or “How would you approach this?”

Let them work through the problem. Let them suggest approaches that might not work. You can guide and ask questions, but don’t rob them of the thinking process.

Be Honest About Their Work

When their analysis isn’t quite there yet, tell them. Not in a mean way, but in an honest way.

“This is a good start, but I don’t think it answers the business question yet” is better than fixing it yourself and delivering it as if it was perfect.

When you constantly smooth over their rough edges, they never learn where the edges are.

Trust Them to Recover

People are more resilient than we give them credit for. They can handle tough questions, wrong analysis, and meetings where they don’t understand everything.

What they can’t handle is never being given the chance to try.

Your job isn’t to prevent them from struggling. It’s to create an environment where struggling leads to growth. Be there to debrief after hard conversations, but let them have the experience in the first place.

The Truth

Protecting your team feels like good leadership. But it’s also limiting.

The analysts who become great advisors learned to navigate stakeholder relationships and business context firsthand. Not through a manager who filtered everything.

Your team doesn’t need a buffer. They need exposure, experience, and trust.

They’ll make mistakes and feel uncomfortable. And they’ll become better analysts because of it.

A Little Assignment

Think about one thing you’re currently doing “for” your team that they could do themselves—a stakeholder relationship you’re managing, a question you’re translating, a meeting you’re attending on their behalf.

This week, hand it off. Brief them, support them, be available if they need you.

Then watch what happens when you stop treating them like fragile little birds and start treating them like the capable analysts they are.