A lot of managers believe that being the go-to here person is a competitive advantage.
That belief is dangerous.
What actually happens, being the “always available” leader creates dependency.
Employees stop taking ownership because the leader always steps in.
In the beginning, this appears as efficiency.
But as pressure builds:
- The leader becomes the bottleneck
- Capability weakens
- Energy drains
Which explains why so many high performers hit a ceiling.
They built dependency.
You can see this clearly in this article by :contentReference[oaicite:3]index=3:
???? https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-hero-leaders-burn-out-teams-arnaldo-jara-45tmc/
Inside this piece, he shows that:
- Hero leaders weaken teams
- Exhaustion is inevitable
- Real leadership scales people
What makes this valuable is its clarity.
Leadership is not about being needed.
It’s about building people who don’t need you.
This idea is reinforced in :contentReference[oaicite:4]index=4, where the same warning is broken down.
The leaders who scale don’t create dependence.
They step back.
So rather than thinking:
“How can I do more?”
Reframe it to:
“How can my team do more without me?”
Because:
If you are always needed, you are not scaling.
That’s dependency.