Nine months into her first VP of Operations role, Taylor had developed a specific and useful skill: reading the rhythm of a system she hadn’t built.
James had founded the company fifteen years earlier. His leadership style was distributed across every corner of the operation; how decisions got made, which fires burned out on their own, whose read of a situation mattered most. Taylor had spent nine months learning that map. Her team ran cleanly. Her numbers held. She and James had developed a functional working rhythm.
In six weeks, James was stepping back for medical leave. Ninety days. And for those ninety days, the map was hers to carry.
She said it matter-of-factly:
“Once the leave starts, it’s just me.”
Not panicked. Not excited. The way you say something you’ve been rehearsing in your head for a while without realizing it.
She mentioned, almost in passing, that she’d nearly missed her daughter’s spring concert the week before. She’d made it; walked in during the third song, found the last seat in the back row, watched the second half from there. Texted James a transition prep note before the house lights went down. Her daughter never knew. The evening went fine.
I’m not complaining, she said. I just don’t want to lead the way I went to that concert. Showing up from the back row, doing what needs to get done, but not really “in it” the way I want to be.
I asked her what winning looked like for her in those 90 days. Not for James. Not for the team. For her, as the one holding the map.
She was quiet for longer than I expected.
“I’ve never thought about it that way,” she said.
She had spent nine months learning to be useful inside a system someone else had built. She was good at it. But she had never once asked herself what she wanted the 90 days to produce for her as a leader; not for the company, not for James’s peace of mind when he returned, but for her own development, her own clarity, her own sense of what leading alone would teach her.
She was nine months in, six weeks from the most significant stretch of her career, and she did not have a scoreboard.
So much of my coaching is about helping leaders give their teams the clarity they need to perform. But that’s never the ultimate goal. It’s the bridge to this: before you can be someone’s upstream, you need to audit what’s upstream in you.
The Upstream Audit™ is a tool I use with leaders who are frustrated with someone on their team. Before any performance conversation, it asks three questions in sequence: Is there a Leadership Problem (unclear expectations)? A Systems Problem (broken or absent infrastructure)? Or is it only then a Performance Problem?
Most performance frustrations dissolve in the first two buckets.
Three Possible Solutions
Taylor didn’t have a frustrated team. She had a transition coming. But the same audit, run inward rather than outward, is how a leader who is about to become someone else’s upstream finds out whether the upstream is ready.
Leadership inward. Can you describe what winning in your role looks like for the next 90 days, in one sentence? Not for James. Not for the organization. For you, as the lead. Have you written it down?
If you can’t answer in one sentence, you can’t give your team the clarity you don’t yet have for yourself. That’s not a team problem. That’s a leadership gap; and it’s yours to close before the leave starts, not during it.
Systems inward. If you were unavailable for two days, could your team locate the status of every open priority without calling you? Is that true right now?
If the only way anyone knows where things stand is to ask you directly, you aren’t running a system. You’re being one. A system that depends entirely on one person doesn’t hold up across 90 days of added load.
Performance inward. Is there a pattern in how you communicate or decide that works fine when someone above you can catch it, but that will surface differently when the authority is yours alone?
Every leader has one. Transitions reveal it. The audit is how you find it before the transition does.
Notice something about the order. All three questions start with you, not your team. The inward audit requires the same move the outward audit does: evaluate the upstream before you evaluate the execution. The upstream, in this case, is you.
Taylor worked through all three questions before our next session. She came back with a one-sentence answer to the first, a list of six open priorities tracked nowhere but in her own head, and one honest naming: she made decisions by consensus. It served her well as a deputy. It would slow her team down when the buck stopped with her alone.
She wasn’t ready. But she knew exactly what she needed to build before the leave started. That’s a different place than not being ready and not knowing why.
She wasn’t going into the 90 days from the back row.
Run It on Yourself First
What if the transition you’re dreading isn’t the problem? What if the problem is the three questions you haven’t yet asked yourself?
What if the preparation you’ve been putting off has nothing to do with the logistics of the handoff and everything to do with your own clarity about what winning looks like when the chair above you is empty?
What if you could walk into the first week of the leave knowing exactly what the scoreboard looks like for you, where the gaps are in your systems, and what to watch in yourself?
The Leader Edition of the Upstream Audit™ was built to help leaders find the gaps before the conversation does. Most leaders use it to evaluate someone on their team. You can run it inward first.