Part of the Leading Leaders series | By Pamela Spencer
The skills that make you a successful leader aren’t always the skills that make you successful at leading other leaders.
For many of us, leadership begins with being the person who solves problems, makes decisions, and steps in when things go wrong. We’re rewarded for having answers, delivering results, and being dependable.
But as our responsibilities grow, that instinct to be the hero can become the very thing holding our teams back.
When every decision requires our involvement, we aren’t necessarily demonstrating strong leadership. We may be creating dependency.
In this article, I explore why one of the most important transitions in leadership is learning to stop being the person everyone needs and start becoming the person who helps others lead.
I used to dread coming back from vacation. Not because I didn’t enjoy the time away. I did. The problem was what was waiting for me when I returned. I’d come back and discover that plenty of work had been done while I was gone—but very little had actually moved forward. Decisions hadn’t been made. Issues hadn’t been resolved. People were waiting for me to get back and “take charge.” And then I’d spend the first few days after vacation digging out from under an avalanche of decisions.
For a while, I thought this was simply the price of leadership. Eventually, I realized it was telling me something I didn’t particularly want to hear: I had made myself too necessary. My team wasn’t failing while I was gone. They were doing exactly what our leadership system had taught them to do. Wait for me. And that was a problem I had helped create.
The Skills That Get You There Aren’t Always the Skills You Need Once You Arrive
Many of us become leaders because we’re good at solving problems. We know how to get things done. We know the organization. We understand the politics and the history. We know who to call. Give us a messy problem and we’ll figure it out.
Being “the fixer” was part of my professional identity for years. But when you become a leader of leaders, something fundamental changes. Your job isn’t to be the best problem solver anymore. Your job is to create more problem solvers. That sounds obvious when I write it now. It wasn’t always obvious when I was living it.
Before You Stop Giving Answers, Figure Out Why They’re Asking
At one point in my career, I had two leaders who regularly came to me looking for answers. On the surface, their behavior looked almost identical. It wasn’t.
Instead of continuing to give them answers, I started asking questions. With the first leader, I quickly discovered that he wasn’t struggling with decision-making. He was missing context. He didn’t always have the larger business picture or the history behind the problem his team was trying to solve. Once I understood the information gap, our conversations changed. I could give him the context: Here’s why the business works this way. Here’s what happened before. Here’s the stakeholder concern you may not know about.
Then I’d ask what he thought we should do. And he usually had an answer. Often, he had several. He loved the change because he was learning the business while becoming increasingly capable of handling situations himself. And something else happened that surprised me: It was actually less mentally taxing for me. I didn’t have to own every problem. I just had to provide the piece of information he couldn’t reasonably have known.
The second leader taught me something completely different. She didn’t lack context. She lacked confidence. As we talked through the issues she brought me, I realized she almost always arrived with a thoughtful plan and good instincts. The problem was that previous leaders hadn’t trusted her to make the decision. So she didn’t trust herself either. Giving her better answers wasn’t going to fix that. Giving her ownership might. I deliberately started finding situations where she could make decisions without me. And when those decisions eventually got escalated, I made sure she saw me stand behind her choices.
Slowly, our conversations changed. They went from: “What do you want me to do?” to: “Here’s what I’m doing and why.” Our meetings became FYIs rather than requests for permission. Her confidence grew. Her job became easier. My job became easier. And together we could cover far more (issues, projects, and processes) than we ever could when every decision had to funnel through me.
Same behavior. Two completely different leadership needs. One needed context. The other needed confidence. Neither actually needed me to solve the problem. That’s an important distinction.
“That’s Not How I Would Do It”
There’s another trap that I still think is particularly difficult for experienced leaders. Your team brings you a perfectly reasonable plan. And immediately you think: That’s not how I would do it. I had exactly that experience on one of the largest projects I’ve led.
I’ve spent much of the last ten years working as a project manager, program manager or de facto technical project sponsor. I’ve worked on enough large technical projects that I’ve developed certain ways of doing things. Data conversion is one of them. I’ve owned it many times. I know how I like it done.
On this particular project, we had a significant data-conversion effort. After an initial meeting where we discussed the work, scope and assumptions, the team came back with their plan. My immediate reaction was: That’s not how I would build that plan.
And I desperately wanted to rewrite it. Part of the temptation was expertise. But if I’m being fair to myself, another part was control. There were many pieces of that project that were complex and constantly changing. Data conversion was something I knew extremely well. It was something I could safely control.
So I had to consciously stop myself. Instead of telling them how I would do it, I asked questions. What are the unknowns? What variables could change? How will you identify and account for them? What’s your fallback plan? Have your stakeholders bought into this approach?
I kept asking until I was convinced they had put as much thought into their approach as I would have. Probably more. And then I let go. Guess what? They were successful. In fact, their part of the project was one of the smoothest. And something even more important happened afterward. I handed that team two additional data-conversion projects—with zero concern and almost no temptation to intervene.
They hadn’t just completed a project. They had built my confidence in them—and their confidence in themselves. That capacity stayed with us long after the original project ended.
Taking Over Always Has a Cost
I’ve stepped in and taken over projects at other points in my career. And yes, sometimes it solved the immediate problem. But it almost always created a larger one. Suddenly I owned one more thing. My workload increased. My capacity decreased. I worked more hours. The pressure increased. And perhaps most importantly, the other people I was responsible for leading had less access to me because I was busy doing work someone else should have been empowered to do.
That’s the hidden cost of being the hero.
We tend to measure the problem we just solved. We don’t measure the coaching conversation we didn’t have. The strategic issue we didn’t have time to think about. The leader who didn’t get our attention. The planning that became reacting. Every time we unnecessarily take something back, something else pays the price.
Someone Had to Do This for Me, Too
I didn’t figure all of this out by myself. About five years ago, I worked for a leader named Sarah Moore, and I credit much of my own leadership pivot to what I learned working for her.
Our relationship wasn’t always easy. But Sarah eventually found the right place for me in the organization—a place where she could trust me. And then she challenged me to trust myself. I used to sit in meetings and marvel at her. Her knowledge. Her confidence. Her willingness to challenge people. Her ability to lead and grow people with very different leadership styles.
I remember wondering where that came from. How do you become that kind of leader? And how would I ever get there? Then Sarah did something incredibly important. She put me in the room and trusted me to do it. That’s when I realized that I wasn’t missing some magical leadership capability. I was missing something much simpler: The trust and faith of another leader, combined with feedback and guidance.
Someone had to give me the space to discover what I was capable of. And eventually, I realized I needed to create that same space for the leaders who worked for me.
From Fixer to Leadership Multiplier
Here’s the part of this transition I didn’t expect. I thought giving up my identity as “the fixer” might make me feel less valuable. Instead, I was ready to give it up long before some of the people around me were ready to let me. And once I did, I found an identity I liked much better: Leadership multiplier.
There is an intense joy in watching someone become more capable because of the environment you’ve helped create. You see a leader become more confident. Then you watch that confidence affect their team. Their people make better decisions. They grow. The organization becomes stronger. The impact multiplies. And yes, I’ll say something we don’t say often enough about leadership: It’s easier.
Not easy. Leadership is never easy. But the strain is different. Instead of spending my days reacting, fixing and carrying everyone’s problems, I can plan. I can think ahead. I can coach. I can spend more of my time being proactive instead of reactive. That’s not just better for me. It’s better leadership.
I Still Have to Work at This
I wish I could end this by saying I mastered this lesson and never slipped back into my old habits. I haven’t. The biggest challenge for me today is creating the time and space to actually coach instead of simply answering questions and making decisions. Because when the pace picks up, the old way is seductive. Someone asks a question. You know the answer. The trains need to stay on schedule. So you make the decision and move on. It’s faster. Today.
But do that often enough and eventually you’re back from vacation staring at a pile of decisions everyone saved for you. So I have learned that time with my leaders has to be protected. Not just operational status meetings. Not another review of deliverables, dates and dashboards. Actual time to talk. What are you seeing? What are you struggling with? What do you think we should do? What aren’t we thinking about? What do you need from me?
That time can feel like a luxury when everything is moving fast. I’ve come to believe it’s exactly the opposite. It’s the work. Because for a leader of leaders, success isn’t measured by how many problems you personally solve. It’s measured by how many people you’ve developed who can solve problems without you. And maybe the best test of all is a surprisingly simple one: Can you go on vacation—and actually take a vacation? If the answer is no, it might be time to stop being the hero. And start building more leaders.
This article is part of the Leading Leaders series, exploring the challenges of developing leaders, building stronger teams, and moving beyond individual contributions to lasting organizational impact. These ideas are explored further in the forthcoming book, When Leaders Lead Leaders, part of the A Practice of Leading series from Augustus Management Press.


