Don't Wait for Someone Else to Fix It

CHAPTER TENEmpower Others

By January 1997, coauthor Chuck was a successful regional vice president for American Express Financial Advisors (now Ameriprise Financial). Because of his stellar performance, consistently in the top 5 percent of his peers, Chuck's leaders decided to accelerate his development by enrolling him in an intensive four‐month program at Harvard Business School's prestigious Advanced Management Program, held on the school's campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There was a catch. To attend, Chuck had to give up his leadership of the region while attending the program. However, the company didn't have the bandwidth to name an interim regional vice president in his absence. So, Chuck needed to figure out how to keep the region humming while he was away. It didn't take long for Chuck to figure out that his absence was both a challenge for him to manage and an opportunity to support the growth of the regional team he led. Later, Chuck would realize that some of his most important leadership lessons began well before he set foot on the Harvard Business School (HBS) campus.

Chuck had nine months until D‐day, the start of his HBS program. He pulled the team together to announce he would be attending the HBS program. Chuck painted an optimistic and realistic picture for his team: this, he emphasized, was a golden opportunity for them to develop and grow since he would need them to take on additional responsibility while he was gone. Since Chuck had routinely made ...