Secondary vs Primary Roles

My friend Stephanie mentioned how much she is struggling with her career and her leadership style she adopts at her work. 

I've been struggling myself with my leadership traits and considering how it might affect my future and my career. I have always been in training and safety for contracting companies. 

This has meant that I'm not the primary money making department. If our operations team fails to perform a job correctly the organization would lose money, people lose jobs, or worse someone could die on the job site if operations fails to work safely. In that environment if a training program was delayed a few months then it didn't really effect the organization very much. It was just pushed off to another time. 

Take the picture up above. In that picture I would not be the person helping the others, nor would I be the person reaching for help. I might be the guy at the end of the line and I would probably be saying "Why are we waiting for this guy?" I would want to climb without help, and get over the crevasse without a hand. I would not be comfortable asking for help, nor would I trust the others providing the help to do a good job giving it. 

Now, as a leader of a training department for a training organization, if the trainer's I lead don't train, or if the courses I help develop don't get delivered, then the entire company suffers. I've gone from being secondary or tertiary to being a primary department. The difficulty is that I still work and act like a supporting player rather than as a lead man. I've always known that I work best alone. Give me a job, leave me alone, and you can trust it will get done. I may not report on it, I may not even tell you when it's done, but it gets done. Now, I'm expected to have far more updates with my leaders, they expect far more communication, they have difficulties with the "go it alone" style of leadership. It's made for some interesting times and has even made me start to think whether I enjoy being the lead performer, or if being a part of the supporting cast is what I enjoy the most.