When you coach youth soccer, you quickly learn you’re not just coaching the kids; you're also coaching their parents. It’s a running joke at this point. The parents often care about the outcomes just as much (if not more) than you or any of the players do.

But the players on the field take direction from you. Their parents do not.

But you’re still asked to do it anyway. In business, the people who shape your success often sit beyond your chain of command. They’re not your team: they’re investors, board members, partners, or the heads of neighboring departments that all hold a stake in your work.

None of them report to you, though, and a good share of your results hinge on how well you work together.

Management writers call this stakeholder management. I think of it a lot like those parents on the sideline.

Every business has one. They’re not the boss or the manager, but they’re the one who gets it. You know the one—you hand them a problem, and it disappears. You don’t feel like you ever need to double-check their work because they’ve earned your trust a hundred times over.

Before you know it, you’re leaning on them and routing more and more of the business through them. 

On one hand, you feel you're identifying talent and giving it room to flourish. And I’ll never say that’s a bad thing.

It can, however, be dangerous. Because leaning on a handful of exceptional people isn’t the same thing as cultivating a strong team.

When I first started long-distance running, I treated my training plan like it was written in stone. Every mile, every rest day, every pace target: all locked in ahread of time. I followed it like the plan itself was the goal, not a means of reaching it.

And then, I got thrown off schedule for the first time. And it wasn’t the only time, either. Nagging injuries, heat waves, freak ice storms, and frenized work weeks have all cropped up more than once.

But because of how I was approaching my training plan, adapting to those moment felt like failure instead of course correction.

All-or-nothing thinking was kicking my teeth in. It was the thought that I’d missed a run, so the plan is ruined, so I might as well try again next marathon.

Looking back, I know where I went wrong: I was mistaking rigidity for discipline.

I spend a solid chunk of my year in rooms full of strangers. Real estate investors in one city, entrepreneurs in the next, and business owners in yet another.

And you know what? The questions people ask after I speak are almost never new. 

That’s not a knock on my audience, by the way. They’re good questions. I just find it interesting—compelling, even—that the same questions keep cropping up regardless of industry or circumstance.

I’ve also noticed that I can come up with answers to their problems much more readily than I can for my own.

That might sound like cruel irony, but it’s a documented psychological phenomenon. And I think understanding it might be one of the keys to solving some of my most confounding problems.