The Operations Bridge

I spent a few weeks a while back deliberately working night shift hours, and it reframed how I think about leadership. Not because the work was different — it wasn’t — but because I wasn’t there for most of it, and neither was almost anyone else who normally makes decisions.

The Real Test of Your Leadership

Anyone can lead a team that’s standing in front of them. The real test of whether you’ve built leaders, not just supervised workers, is what happens on the shift where you’re asleep. Does the team default to “wait until morning and ask,” or do they know how to make the call themselves?

What I Found

Some of it was reassuring. The team had genuinely internalized parts of our standard work — changeover sequences ran clean without anyone hovering. Some of it wasn’t. Decisions that should have taken thirty seconds were getting escalated up a chain that ended, eventually, with someone waiting for a callback from a manager who was asleep.

That gap wasn’t the night shift’s fault. It was mine. I hadn’t clearly delegated the authority to make those thirty-second calls — I’d only delegated the tasks.

Delegating Authority, Not Just Tasks

There’s a difference between telling someone what to do and telling them what they’re allowed to decide without you. Most leaders do the first constantly and the second almost never, because it feels riskier. But refusing to delegate authority doesn’t eliminate the risk — it just moves it to whatever happens while you’re unreachable.

Go work the shift you never see. You’ll find out fast whether your leadership actually left the building with you, or whether it stayed behind.