I was still shooting the video. Still running the social accounts. Still touching the website when I probably had no business touching it.
I had a team. A good one. People I’d hired specifically because they could do these things. And I was still doing them, year after year, because I was good at them and I liked doing them and somewhere along the way those reasons had become reason enough.
This is a common story in marcomm leadership, and we need to talk about it plainly. We talk about delegation and trust and developing others. We talk about moving from player to coach. What we don’t talk about is how long it takes to actually do it, and what you find when you do.
When you build a career on the quality of your own output, that capability becomes load-bearing. It’s how you got recognized. How you got promoted. How you understood your own value in the room. For marcomm leaders especially, the craft is personal. The writing, the visual work, the strategy — these are more than just job functions. They’re how you think and how you see.
At my prior institution, staying in the work wasn’t really a choice. The team was small and the resources were finite, and the job required me to keep producing. I got very good at doing both. And I carried that capacity with me when I came to Forsyth Technical Community College. The team started to grow. My approach to the work didn’t.
The team grew. My role in the work didn’t change at the same pace. I kept the pieces that felt most like me. Shooting and editing video myself. Writing the posts for the social channels I’d built from scratch. Rewriting pages on the website that weren’t mine to touch anymore. Because I was good at those things, and because being good at something for a long time makes it hard to imagine someone else carrying it.
The cost was real. I was stretched in ways that were starting to show. I wasn’t as present with my team as they needed. I wasn’t operating at the strategic level my role required. And my team couldn’t fully own their work because I was always near enough that they knew I might take it back.
When I finally gave people real space, the change was faster than I expected.
My team did more than just fill what I’d been holding. They went past it. People I’d been quietly hovering near turned out to have instincts I’d never given them room to use. They made calls differently than I would have and got results I wouldn’t have gotten. They built relationships I hadn’t thought to build. They found angles I’d have missed because I was too fixed in my own way of seeing the work.
The culture of the division shifted. People started bringing ideas instead of waiting for direction. They took ownership in ways they hadn’t before, because the work was actually theirs and they knew it.
Micromanaging, even the careful kind, even the kind that comes from caring about quality, trains people to wait for your judgment instead of developing their own.
Pull back and watch what happens to people who have passion and know their work is trusted.
For most of my team, what happened was proliferation. Real growth, fast.
Autonomy also shows you things that are harder to see.
I had someone on my team with strong technical skills. The craft was there, developed over years, the kind of thing you notice right away. Videography and photography, genuinely excellent at the mechanics of both. What didn’t develop, across years of coaching and feedback and opportunity, was storytelling instinct. The ability to look at raw material and feel what it means. To sequence moments into something that moves an audience.
When I was close to the work, I could compensate. Redirect, reframe, quietly adjust. When the work was fully theirs, the gap was just there.
That situation didn’t resolve quickly or cleanly. And it raised questions I’ve sat with since. Did I hire for the right things? Was my coaching building judgment or just getting specific pieces of work across the finish line? Was I staying in the work because my team needed me there, or because I needed to be there?
Those questions don’t have easy answers. But they’re only available to ask once you’ve actually let go. When you’re still in the work, you can’t see what your presence is covering.
The player-to-coach transition gets framed as a decision. Decide to trust your team. Decide to develop rather than produce. And there is a decision involved, a real one, but it’s less about mindset than about tolerance for what you find on the other side.
Some people on your team will do things with real space that they couldn’t do with you nearby. Others will show you something about fit that no amount of coaching was going to change. Both only become visible once the space is real.
The marcomm leaders I’ve watched build the strongest teams are the ones who got uncomfortable first. Who had real craft and decided their job was to build the people around them rather than protect the work themselves. Who understood that staying in what you’re best at, past the point where the role requires it, costs your team more than it costs you.
Getting out of the work is hard. What you find on the other side makes it worth it. Every marcomm leader has something they haven’t let go of yet. The question worth asking isn’t whether you trust your team enough to hand it over. It’s what you’ve been covering by keeping it.
