Leaders: If You Want to Go Fast, Go Alone. If You Want to Go Far, Go Together.

There is an old saying, attributed from everything to American military generals to African proverbs, that goes something like this: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” The precise origin is uncertain. Researchers who have traced its history have found similar expressions in African oral traditions, as well as related ideas in Western literature dating back more than a century. A version of the modern wording appeared in Bill Hull’s 2004 book Choose the Life, although Hull himself attributed it to an African proverb. Whatever its origins, the saying captures one of the most important, and sometimes most frustrating, truths about leadership: It is often easier to accomplish something yourself than to lead a team that can accomplish it without you.

Anyone who has spent much time in the military or in business knows the temptation. You assign someone a task, explain what you want accomplished, and watch as they begin working through it. Almost immediately, you notice that they are approaching the problem differently than you would. They are taking longer. They are asking questions you think they should already know the answers to. They are making decisions you would not make, organizing information differently, or overlooking details that seem obvious to you. Eventually, you reach a point where you realize that you could probably accomplish the task yourself in half the time. And you are probably right.

That is what makes delegation so difficult. The problem is not necessarily that the subordinate is incompetent or that the leader is impatient. Sometimes the leader genuinely is better at the task. Experience matters. Expertise matters. Someone who has performed a particular function hundreds of times will usually be faster and more proficient than someone who is still learning. But the question leaders must ask is whether their responsibility is to accomplish that particular task or to build an organization capable of accomplishing that task, and hundreds of others, without their constant involvement. But those are two very different things.

Early in our careers, we are generally rewarded for individual competence. In the Army, a young soldier earns recognition by being physically fit, proficient with assigned equipment, technically competent, and dependable. A young officer distinguishes himself or herself by mastering the fundamentals of the profession, making sound decisions, and accomplishing assigned missions. In business, the same principle applies. The employee who works harder, solves problems faster, and produces better results often receives recognition and promotion. Individual excellence becomes the foundation upon which professional advancement is built.

But somewhere along the way, the nature of success changes. The skills that made someone an outstanding individual contributor do not automatically make that person an effective leader. In fact, some of those skills can become obstacles. The highly capable employee who always has the answer may struggle to let others discover answers for themselves. The officer who could accomplish every task personally as a lieutenant may become a company commander who cannot stop micromanaging platoon leaders. The entrepreneur who built a successful business through personal effort may eventually become the greatest obstacle to that business’s growth.

The problem is that the organization has outgrown the individual’s capacity, but the individual has not yet outgrown the desire to control everything.

I have seen versions of this problem throughout my military career. Some leaders were extraordinarily capable at the tactical or technical level but struggled when their responsibilities expanded. They knew exactly how they wanted things done, and they had difficulty accepting that other competent people might approach the same problem differently. Their standards were high, their intentions were good, and their personal work ethic was often exceptional. Unfortunately, they had built organizations that depended too heavily on their individual involvement.

That kind of leadership can produce impressive short-term results. It can also create an organization that becomes progressively less capable of functioning without the person in charge.

The same thing happens in civilian organizations. A manager reviews every document before it goes out. A business owner insists on approving every purchase. A senior executive wants to be included in every consequential conversation. An editor rewrites every article rather than helping writers become better at their craft. Each intervention may improve the immediate product, but collectively they create a system in which decisions slow down, employees become reluctant to exercise initiative, and the leader becomes overwhelmed by responsibilities that should have been distributed throughout the organization. The leader becomes indispensable, which may feel flattering, but is usually evidence of an organizational problem. To sum up, a leader’s goal should not be to become indispensable. It should be to build an organization that can succeed without them.

That is much easier to say than to accomplish.

Building teams is messy. People have different personalities, capabilities, motivations, and priorities. They misunderstand instructions. They disagree about how to approach problems. They sometimes disappoint us. They bring personal problems to work, occasionally make avoidable mistakes, and do not always recognize what seems obvious to someone with more experience. Even good people, working with the best intentions, can make teamwork frustrating and time-consuming.

And then there is the matter of personalities. Some people are naturally collaborative. Others prefer to work independently. Some are confident to the point of arrogance, while others need encouragement before they will offer an opinion. Some are excellent planners but poor executors. Others are gifted at execution but struggle to see beyond the immediate problem. Building an effective team requires understanding those differences, identifying people’s strengths and weaknesses, and finding ways to make their individual capabilities complement one another.

That process takes time, and it rarely produces immediate perfection.In fact, one of the hardest lessons for a leader to learn is that someone else’s “good enough” is often better for the organization than your personal version of perfect. And sometimes, a subordinate’s best is merely your good enough.

That statement requires some qualification. There are circumstances in which good enough is not good enough. Aviation maintenance, medical procedures, weapons safety, intelligence reporting, and countless other activities require strict adherence to established standards. A leader cannot compromise safety, ethics, legality, or mission-critical requirements simply to give subordinates an opportunity to learn. Standards exist for a reason, and leaders have a responsibility to enforce them.

But many of the things leaders insist upon are not actually standards. They are preferences.

The briefing is organized differently than you would have organized it. The spreadsheet uses another format. The employee approaches a problem from a different direction. The platoon leader chooses a course of action that is not the one you would have selected, but it still accomplishes the mission. The finished product is not precisely what you envisioned, but it meets the requirements, achieves the intended outcome, and does not create unacceptable risk. At that point, the leader has a choice. Accept the result and allow the subordinate to develop confidence and competence, or intervene to make the product conform to a personal preference.

Too many leaders choose the second option.The cost is not immediately apparent. The document gets better. The briefing looks cleaner. The leader feels reassured that the organization is maintaining high standards. But the subordinate learns something as well: that initiative is less important than predicting the boss’s preferences, that independent judgment will be second-guessed, and that the safest approach is to ask for guidance before making a decision.

Over time, the organization becomes less innovative, less adaptable, and more dependent on the person who believes they are making it better.

The military has a useful concept for avoiding this problem: mission command. At its core, mission command requires leaders to communicate their intent, establish the purpose of an operation, provide appropriate resources, and empower subordinates to exercise disciplined initiative. The commander determines what must be accomplished and why, while allowing subordinates the freedom to determine how best to accomplish it within established constraints.

That is not an absence of leadership. It is a more demanding form of leadership. It requires commanders to develop subordinates before they need them to make difficult decisions. It requires trust, which must be earned and reinforced through repeated experience. It requires leaders to accept that subordinates will sometimes make decisions that are different from the ones they would have made. And it requires the maturity to recognize that a different decision is not necessarily a wrong decision.

Perhaps most importantly, it requires leaders to resist the temptation to intervene simply because they can.

This is especially difficult for talented, experienced leaders. When you know how to solve a problem, watching someone else struggle with it can be painful. But that struggle is often where learning occurs. If a leader constantly provides the answer, the subordinate may accomplish the immediate task without developing the judgment necessary to solve the next problem independently.

There is a difference between helping someone succeed and preventing someone from learning.

The best leaders understand that distinction. They know when to provide guidance, when to ask questions, when to intervene, and when to stand back. They recognize that developing people sometimes requires accepting a slower process or a less polished result today in exchange for a more capable organization tomorrow.

Of course, there are limits. Not every task should be delegated, and not every mistake should be tolerated. Leaders remain responsible for outcomes, and accountability cannot be delegated away. A commander cannot excuse mission failure by explaining that the platoon leader needed an opportunity to develop. A business executive cannot justify a catastrophic financial decision by claiming that the employee responsible was learning. Effective delegation requires clear expectations, appropriate oversight, realistic assessments of subordinate competence, and a willingness to intervene when the consequences of failure become unacceptable.

But those limitations should not become excuses for refusing to delegate at all.

One of the most important responsibilities of leadership is determining where mistakes are tolerable and where they are not. If a subordinate can learn from an error without compromising safety, ethics, or the mission, the long-term value of that experience may outweigh the immediate cost. If the consequences are potentially catastrophic, the leader must provide greater supervision and more deliberate controls. The objective is not to eliminate risk. It is to manage risk in ways that develop organizational competence rather than suppress it.

There is another reason teamwork matters, one that goes beyond efficiency and professional development. No matter how talented a leader may be, that person’s perspective is necessarily limited.

We all have blind spots. Our experiences shape how we interpret problems, evaluate information, and make decisions. The very expertise that makes someone effective can also make that person resistant to alternative approaches. When we have solved a particular kind of problem successfully in the past, we naturally gravitate toward the same solution when a similar problem appears.

Sometimes that is exactly the right approach. Sometimes it is not.

A well-developed team brings together people who see different aspects of a problem. They challenge assumptions, identify risks, and suggest alternatives that might never occur to the person in charge. That process can be uncomfortable. It takes time to hear competing perspectives, and disagreement can make decision-making feel unnecessarily complicated. But the purpose of a team is not simply to provide more hands to execute the leader’s ideas. It is to bring additional judgment, experience, and perspective to the organization.

A leader surrounded by people who always agree may make decisions quickly. That does not mean those decisions are good.

This is one of the reasons effective teams require a degree of humility from their leaders. We have to acknowledge that we do not know everything, that our preferred solution may not be the best one, and that someone with less experience or lower rank may see something we have overlooked. We also have to recognize that our personal success does not necessarily translate into organizational success.

In fact, the more senior we become, the less useful individual brilliance is if we cannot translate it into collective performance.

A company commander who personally excels at every task but cannot develop platoon leaders is not building a strong company. A CEO who makes every important decision but cannot develop capable executives is limiting the organization’s future. A professor who demonstrates extraordinary knowledge but cannot help students learn has misunderstood the purpose of teaching. In each case, the individual’s competence matters, but its greatest value comes from making other people more capable.

That is the real work of leadership.

It is also why building teams requires patience. Trust does not appear because someone has been assigned to a position. Competence does not develop because a leader has issued instructions. Shared understanding does not emerge from a single meeting or a carefully written mission statement. These things develop through experience, communication, feedback, and the sometimes frustrating process of working through difficult problems together.

There will be misunderstandings. There will be personality conflicts. There will be occasions when the leader has to repeat an explanation, correct a mistake, or accept a result that is less elegant than the one they could have produced personally. There will be times when building the team seems to require more effort than accomplishing the mission.

But those investments accumulate.

The subordinate who struggles through a problem today may become the person who solves a much more difficult problem tomorrow. The employee who needs close supervision this month may eventually become the manager who develops an entire department. The platoon leader who initially requires considerable guidance may become the commander who makes the right decision when communications fail and higher headquarters cannot be reached.

The organization becomes stronger not because the leader has personally solved every problem, but because the leader has helped create more people who can solve problems.

And that is where the proverb becomes particularly meaningful.

Going fast is attractive because speed is visible. We can measure how quickly a task is completed, how many decisions are made, or how much work an individual produces. Going far is harder to measure. It requires thinking about organizational endurance, succession, institutional knowledge, adaptability, and the ability to sustain performance over time.

The leader who does everything personally may win the race to the next deadline. The leader who builds a capable team may create an organization that continues succeeding long after that deadline, and long after the leader has moved on.

In the Army, commanders change. Soldiers rotate. Units deploy, return, reorganize, and deploy again. In business, employees leave, executives retire, markets change, and organizations face challenges their founders never anticipated. Any organization built around the exceptional abilities of a single individual is vulnerable when that individual is no longer available.

A genuinely strong organization is one in which competence is distributed, initiative is encouraged, and people understand both their responsibilities and the larger purpose behind them.

That kind of organization is difficult to build. It requires leaders to surrender some control, accept some imperfection, and invest considerable time in developing people who may eventually become better at certain things than they are.

Especially that last part.

There is something deeply satisfying about being the smartest, most capable, or most experienced person in the room. It is reassuring to know that you can accomplish a task better than anyone else. But leaders who derive their identity primarily from being indispensable will eventually struggle to develop the people around them. They may unconsciously discourage initiative, withhold responsibility, or insist on remaining involved in decisions that others are perfectly capable of making.

The best leaders take pride in something different. They want to see their subordinates succeed. They want to develop people who can operate independently, challenge their assumptions, and eventually surpass them. They understand that their greatest professional accomplishment may not be something they personally did, but something another person accomplished because of their leadership.

That requires a different definition of success.

Sometimes you have to accept that the task will take longer. Sometimes you have to accept that the result will be merely good enough rather than the perfect version you had in mind. Sometimes you have to watch someone struggle with a problem you could solve in minutes. And sometimes you have to give someone else the opportunity to receive credit for something you helped make possible.

None of that is easy.

But leadership was never supposed to be about making everything easier for the leader.

It is about building something larger, stronger, and more enduring than any one person. It is about developing the capabilities of others, creating organizations that can adapt to changing circumstances, and ensuring that success does not depend upon the continued presence of a single exceptionally talented individual.

There will always be times when going alone makes sense. Some decisions require immediate action. Some tasks are best accomplished individually. Sometimes speed matters more than endurance, and a leader must personally intervene to prevent failure.

But those should be deliberate choices, not the default approach to leadership.

Because the real measure of a leader is not how much that person can accomplish alone. It is how much the people around them become capable of accomplishing together.

You might get there faster by yourself.

But if you want to build something that lasts, you had better bring some people with you.

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Charles served over 27 years in the US Army, which included seven combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with various Special Operations Forces units and two stints as an instructor at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He also completed operational tours in Egypt, the Philippines, and the Republic of Korea and earned a Doctor of Business Administration from Temple University as well as a Master of Arts in International Relations from Yale University. He is the owner of The Havok Journal, and the views expressed herein are his own and do not reflect those of the US Government or any other person or entity.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.