From Administrator to Architect: Thinking Differently About the Role of Leadership

For many leaders, the challenge of the role isn’t just a lack of time, but the sense of being buried in day-to-day demands, much of it taken up by work they weren’t actually hired to do. In addition, human-centric leadership, involving thinking time, one-to-one conversations, and focussing on how teams process work, isn’t given the attention it merits.

That’s also where a lot of frustration comes from, because when you really stop and think about it, it isn’t the leadership work that’s filling the day. It isn’t the thinking time, the planning, or the conversations that make progress happen. It’s everything else: emails, updates, meetings, chasing information, reformatting documents, responding to requests, and the constant need to check where projects have got to.

It’s natural to think, ‘Well, that’s just part of the job’. The problem is, when all that noise and busyness becomes the major part of the job, it starts to crowd out the tasks that leaders are meant to be doing.

The hidden cost of ‘work about work’

Recent studies suggest that managers spend up to 70% of their time on what we might call ‘work about work’, i.e. the coordination, the follow-ups, the reporting, the small tasks that keep everything moving but don’t necessarily move anything forward. When you look back over a couple of days and audit where your time has gone, it can be quite revealing.

The impact isn’t just about time, because there’s a human cost to it too. When a leader spends most of the day reacting, fixing, and chasing, they don’t tend to leave work with a sense of having achieved something productive. They leave feeling depleted. They’ve been busy, but not necessarily effective.

There’s also an organisational cost. If people are tied up in the detail, then who is looking ahead? Who is spotting patterns, thinking about what’s coming next, or creating space for innovation? That kind of thinking doesn’t happen in the minutes between back-to-back meetings.

From managing tasks to designing how work happens

This is where we need to change the way leaders work and adopt a more human-centric approach.

Traditionally, many leadership roles have drifted into what we might call the administrator space. The focus is on managing tasks, responding to issues, and keeping projects moving. It’s reactive by nature. You’re asking questions like, ‘Is that done yet?’ or ‘Where have we got to with this?’ And without meaning to, you can become the point that everything flows through, which is where bottlenecks start to appear.

By contrast, when you step into what we call the architect mindset, the focus changes. You’re not just managing the work, you’re designing the environment in which the work happens. You start asking different questions. Instead of ‘How do I get through all of this?’, it becomes ‘Why does this keep happening, and how could it work differently?’

That might mean putting clearer boundaries in place so that decisions don’t always need to come back to you. It might mean creating a single source of information so people aren’t constantly chasing updates. Or it might simply mean taking a step back and asking whether a task needs to exist at all.

A useful way to start thinking about this is to look at work through the lens of energy, not just time. If the types of task are mapped out, there are usually four broad areas:

• Work that adds value and uses best thinking.
• Necessary but routine work that keeps projects ticking over.
• Draining tasks (the drains) that take a lot of energy but don’t add much value.
• ‘Ghost tasks’ that have always been done but no one has really questioned why.

When people do this exercise properly, what often becomes clear is that a significant amount of time is being spent in the drains and the ghost tasks. If leaders are using their best mental energy on that type of work, then they’re not just losing time, they’re losing the capacity to do the work that moves business forwards – the work they’re there to do.

This is where the idea of the ‘AI Dividend’ comes in. This isn’t about replacing people or removing leadership. It’s all about reclaiming time. If leaders can automate or simplify some of the repetitive, low-value tasks they’re currently doing, they start to buy back space in their week.

Achieving this might be something straightforward such as automating reporting, using tools to summarise meetings, or removing some of the back-and-forth involved in coordination. These aren’t complex changes, but they can make a noticeable difference.

Reclaiming time and reducing unnecessary work

The important question then is what happens to that time once it’s been reclaimed. This is where many people fall into the same pattern again. The space gets filled with more emails, more updates, more of the same, and before long, nothing has really changed.

The move from administrator to architect only happens when that reclaimed time is used deliberately. This is point at which leadership is able to refocus on things like having conversations that support and develop people, having the thinking time that allows the identification of patterns and freeing up time to take stock and redesign how things are working, rather than constantly firefighting.

These kinds of things can’t be automated. They require judgement, empathy, decision-making or the ability to unite a team in order to work through a complex project. This is exactly what leadership is about.

In many ways, it isn’t about doing less work, it’s about doing the right work. When leaders recognise that they spend most of their time doing things that a system or a process could handle, they’re not just under-using their capability, they’re limiting what their team can achieve as well.

For most people, beginning to make the change doesn’t have to be dramatic. It can be as contained as identifying one task that consistently drains time and energy, and asking whether it could be removed, simplified, or handled differently. Even that small difference can begin to create space, and once that space is there, you can start to use it more deliberately.

As those changes gradually build, the leadership role encounters less friction and frustration, and better use of time and energy. The role moves away from managing tasks and back towards leading people.

This blog is based on Part 1 of the Leading the Human-Centric Organisation webinar series: From Administrator to Architect. You can watch the full session on YouTube, along with Part 2, The Empathy Engine – Scaling Human Connection, which discusses how leaders use the time they’ve reclaimed to strengthen trust, connection, and team performance. See links below.

In Part 1 – From Administrator to Architect, the focus is on moving away from administrative overload and reclaiming time.
In Part 2 – The Empathy Engine, we talk about what to do with that newly available time.

If your organisation is looking to reduce administrative friction and encourage more dynamic leadership, the Jigsaw Discovery Tool provides an easy-to-adopt, effective framework to support that goal. To find out more, or to discuss how this could work in your organisation, get in touch.