When Doing Less Asks More of You

Many of the leaders I work with are worn out. They care deeply about their teams and are carrying more than they can sustain. Alongside their own responsibilities, they’ve taken on pieces of everyone else’s.

It can look like this:

• A report needs more work, so you rewrite it yourself.

• Someone is struggling with a task, so you take it off their plate.

• A situation needs an honest conversation, so you find a way to work around it.

This is over-functioning: taking on responsibility that belongs to others. You may already recognize how much it’s exhausting you. But seeing the pattern is easier than untangling yourself from it, especially when the people around you have come to rely on you to play this role.

How do you step back when so much depends on you stepping in?

It’s a question worth taking seriously, because the cost reaches well beyond your own exhaustion.

How this pattern took root

Over-functioning often grows from lessons about how to care for people and what it takes to succeed.

Many of us, especially women, learned that being caring means anticipating other people’s needs and easing their burdens. Taking something off someone’s plate becomes a familiar way to show support. We may receive far more encouragement for being helpful and accommodating than for setting limits.

Workplaces reinforce those lessons. When you solve the problem, absorb the extra work, or keep a project moving, you earn trust and recognition. That willingness to take responsibility may be part of what brought you into leadership. And when an organization routinely relies on people going beyond their capacity, carrying too much can become an unspoken expectation.

This connects to the work of Blindspotting: recognizing how strengths that helped us succeed can begin to limit us. Your ability to get things done still matters. But as a leader, it is essential to figure out how to make your workload sustainable and support the development and capacity of your team. 

The pattern has a history of working for you and for the people around you. Changing it is no easy task. For my coaching clients, it has required deep shifts in identity, relationships, expectations, and automatic responses. 

It's easy to feel like you should be able to just change as soon as you see something isn't working for you, but that's not how being a human being works. Transforming a deeply ingrained pattern like this is a personal journey. A journey of trial and error, of learning and unlearning. But, I promise, the destination is worth working for. 

“It’s easy to feel like you should be able to just change as soon as you see something isn’t working for you, but that’s not how being a human being works. ”

The Truth About Unlearning Over-functioning

When you begin to step back from overfunctioning, you start to see how much it has been serving you. Alongside the workload you resent, it also gives you control, a way around uncomfortable conversations, and reassurance that you’re competent and needed. Delegating a task doesn’t automatically resolve the problems that over-functioning solves for you. Unlearning the pattern means acknowledging how it supports you and developing new ways to meet those needs.

You have to befriend uncertainty

You can resent doing everything and still feel safer knowing it’s all in your hands. Sharing ownership means someone else may take a different approach, need more time, or make a mistake you could have prevented. That can bring up real fears about being held responsible for an outcome you didn’t control.

When you’re already stretched, making time to teach and coach can feel impossible. Doing it yourself solves the immediate problem but keeps you responsible for solving it next time. Creating room for someone to learn means tolerating uncertainty while investing time you already feel you don’t have.

The work happens in that uncomfortable space between wanting to take over and figuring out how to support someone in doing it themselves. It asks you to notice when your response is driven by your own unease and practice offering guidance that leaves the ownership with them, even while you’re still anxious about the outcome.

You have to have uncomfortable conversations

Rewriting someone’s work or absorbing another responsibility lets you avoid discussing what isn’t working. Changing that means clarifying expectations, giving feedback you’ve withheld, and acknowledging your part in the pattern.

In my six-part leadership series, Leading with Clarity, Courage, and Connection, participants identified difficult conversations as the hardest part of leadership by a wide margin. A later poll revealed their biggest fear about those conversations: harming the relationship. Yet over-functioning and avoidance are already doing harm, through resentment and lost opportunities for growth.

Learning to have these conversations means practicing skills you haven’t mastered… an uncomfortable position for someone accustomed to getting things right. Support from a coach or supervisor, or dedicated training, can help you build skills and confidence.

The deeper work is changing your relationship with someone else’s discomfort. Their disappointment or frustration may feel like yours to resolve. It takes practice to stay caring and honest while trusting them to work through those feelings and grow. With practice, you can become someone they feel safe working through difficulty with, even when you’re giving them feedback.

You can rethink who you are as a leader

The Conscious Leadership Group describes this as a shift from Hero to Coach. The Hero takes responsibility for other people’s problems, finding relief in rescuing them. The Coach trusts their capacity and supports them in taking ownership. That shift asks you to reconsider what makes you valuable.

There’s an opportunity here to build your identity around qualities you’re developing through this work. Integrity grows as you address what you once avoided. Courage grows as you learn to share control without knowing exactly how things will turn out. Generosity takes shape in sharing your knowledge and helping someone become capable of things you may never have mastered yourself.

It takes time to value yourself for these contributions when being the one who saves the day has brought so much recognition. Part of unlearning over-functioning is learning to take pride in the leader you’re becoming, including in moments when someone else’s success is the most visible result of your work.