Sausage-Making or Sausage Casing?

Sausage casing or sausage-making?

“I didn’t have anything to do with planning this!”

That was what the CEO, we’ll call him Mike, said at the beginning of a strategic offsite a few months ago.

I looked at the group and smiled. “When I was designing this offsite, I asked Mike if he wanted to be in the sausage-making, or if he was cool with just the sausage casing. This time, he agreed to the sausage casing—so here we are.”

The team laughed, but the point resonated—especially with a CEO who, like many, has a tendency to get into the weeds.

There’s no shame or blame here. Getting into the weeds for leaders feels good.

Getting involved in the process rather than the outcomes feels comfortable.

Finding solutions is where we all want to live. It makes sense.

And it’s generally done with the best of intentions: to ensure an outstanding outcome.

That said, there’s a distinction in leadership that’s critical to master: knowing when you need to be involved in the process versus when you need to set your expectations for the outcome and then trust the experts on your team.

The sausage-making…versus the sausage casing.

It’s a distinction that becomes even more important as you rise through the leadership ranks. The higher you go, the more you need to trust your experts and resist the gravitational pull of the details.

It’s not that details don’t matter. Of course they do. But when a leader constantly dives into the micro aspects of the work that their team can own, several problems start to emerge. They:

1. Become a bottleneck, slowing progress and decision-making. And we all love to be bottlenecks, right?
2. Signal a lack of trust in their team’s expertise, even if that’s not the case.
3. Spread themselves too thin across too many priorities.
4. Prevent their team from developing ownership and accountability, which is a big part of how they grow as leaders, too.

So how do you navigate the balance of sausage-making versus sausage casing?

From where I sit as a leadership coach, it comes down to asking yourself this powerful question:

“Am I needed here, or am I just needed to trust here?”

The shift from doing to leading, from making to enabling, is one of the hardest transitions in leadership. But it’s also one of the most liberating, for both you and your team and your team.

PS-The grammar nerd in me is going to point out that “sausage-making” is a compound verb (hence the hyphen), and “sausage causing” is a noun. Leaders, it’s ok to receive the noun and not be involved in the verb.