Stay in Your Lane

Sometimes the greatest threat to your assignment is good work that isn’t yours to do.

As the founder and president of an organization, I have come to realize there are certain responsibilities that are uniquely mine. There are things I can delegate—and should delegate—but there are also things that simply cannot be handed to someone else.

The challenge is that I enjoy being involved. I see a problem and want to help solve it. I see something that needs attention and can easily step in. Most of the time, these are good things that genuinely need to be done.

But they don’t necessarily need to be done by me.

That distinction matters because every time I take responsibility for something someone else can do, I potentially step away from something only I can do. I may be helping, but I have also vacated my position.

I think about Nehemiah when he was rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem. His enemies repeatedly tried to pull him away from the work and arrange a meeting with him. His response has become one of my favorite pictures of leadership:

“I am carrying on a great project and cannot go down. Why should the work stop while I leave it and go down to you?” — Nehemiah 6:3 (NIV)

Nehemiah understood his assignment. There were undoubtedly countless other matters he could have given his attention to, but he knew what he had been entrusted to do. He refused to come down from the wall.

For those of us in business and leadership, the distractions are usually far less obvious. They may even look like responsibility. An operational problem needs solving. Someone needs help with a project. A decision needs to be made. Because we can do something, we assume we should.

But good leadership requires asking a different question: What can only I do?

Every position has a lane. For a founder, it might be protecting the mission, shaping culture, developing key relationships, seeing what is coming next, or ensuring the organization remains faithful to its purpose. For a manager, it may be developing people, setting expectations, and providing clarity. Whatever your role, there are responsibilities you have been uniquely entrusted to carry.

Paul wrote, “Pay careful attention to your own work” (Galatians 6:4 NLT). There is wisdom in knowing what your work actually is.

Staying in your lane doesn’t mean refusing to help others or saying, “That’s not my job.” Great teams serve one another, and great leaders are willing to roll up their sleeves. Humility sometimes means doing work beneath your position. But humility also means recognizing that you are not needed everywhere.

There is a difference between serving outside your lane and abandoning your lane.

I’m learning that one of my responsibilities as a leader is to know that difference. Sometimes the most responsible thing I can say to a legitimate need is, “Someone else can handle that.” Not because the work is unimportant, but because there is other work I have been entrusted with that I cannot delegate.

So perhaps the question for each of us is simple:

What can and should only you do in your role?

Identify it. Protect it. Give it your best.

There will always be reasons to come down from the wall.

Stay focused on the work you have been given to do.