In the movie Top Gun, the pilots must stay above the “hard deck” while training; it’s an arbitrary altitude that represents the ground. (They don’t use the real ground, because it’s training and that would be too dangerous. So, if the hard deck is 10,000 feet and you fly lower than that, it means you crashed and burned).

In leadership, the hard deck represents issues and details that will pull a leader down into disaster. It’s the stuff that can feel like you are helping, but distracts you from the vitally important issues only you can address.

The leaders I see who fly too low are generally unclear about where they need to be spending their time. They allow others to take control of their calendar, fail to delegate, and lean towards tactical issues over high-priority strategic work.

How does this happen? Many leaders think: this issue is really big, so I’m going to stay involved. As a result, they run out of runway space. Implicit here is often a lack of trust in whomever should be managing the issue.

However, by delegating more you may find out that someone’s judgment is bad enough that they don’t belong in their role. This, of course, is important information to gain, and you won’t discover it unless you give others room to make their own mistakes.

To support development, you need to let others make some suboptimal decisions along the way. Yes, sometimes those decisions can have big dollars attached to them, and might even cost the company a customer. But if you never take risks with your people, they never feel the weight or get to see the ramifications of the decisions they make.

To recap, when you fly too close to the hard deck, you blunt your own effectiveness and make it harder for rising talent to learn. Adjust your altitude so you (and they) don’t crash and burn.