From Transparent Leadership Beats Servant Leadership, by Chris at Entropic Thoughts:

In my book, a good leader

coaches people,
connects people,
[. . .]
creates direct links between supply and demand (instead of deliberately making themselves a middle man),
[. . .]
generally makes themselves redundant.

I really related with many of the points in this post. Coincidentally, I had just recently come to some similar conclusions at my own workplace, too.

Effective leaders enable people to solve problems and make progress on their own, so the presence of the best leaders will probably be hard to notice.

I am reminded of a quote from Lao-Tzu (or at least one version of its translation) that has stuck in my mind:

A leader is best when people barely know he exists. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: We did it ourselves.

I would often place myself as a middle man in communications deliberately, especially when I was invested in the communication and the other parties involved were also busy doing other things at the same time. The intent was that I could steer the conversation to an efficient consensus, by framing the discussions and paraphrasing or summarizing (what I thought to be) the important points.

In reality though, I was often doing more harm than good.

By placing myself in the middle of communications, I make myself a bottleneck. If I was busy doing something else, I might delay responses, and it was often faster to just have the two people talk to each other directly.

And when I put information through my own filter of what I felt was important or not, It’s too easy to get the nuance wrong. Even if things seemed to work out at the time, small differences in understanding can compound over time and turn into a bigger problem in the future. In these cases too, I think now that it’s more effective to just have everyone speak to each other directly.

Of course, not everyone can be talking to everyone else all the time, and determining how much is too much might be an area where my input could help. But in general, I’m trying very hard not to speak for other people, and am trying instead to be someone who can connect people to each other quickly and efficiently.