If you become a sales manager, you need to keep going on sales calls yourself. If you manage a team of plumbers, fix some faucets. Of course, you need to spend time listening to people in 1:1s, leading debates, and so on. But you need to learn to toggle between leading and executing personally.

Which brings us to a crucial question: How do you know when you’ve crossed the demarcation line, when it’s time to make the shift from “develop” to “replace” for a key seat? I’ve come to believe the best approach is to ask considered questions and let those questions guide you to an answer. I’ve distilled years of reflection down to seven questions