As a leader, it can be tempting to solve problems for your team, but constantly rescuing your team can undermine accountability, limit their confidence and leave you carrying responsibilities that should be shared.
Step in and solve a problem for someone, and you teach them something. Usually something valuable, drawn from your own experience. But you may also teach them that next time, the fastest way through is you.
Repeatedly rescuing your team quietly erodes accountability. People learn that escalating gets problems solved, so ownership drifts back up to the leader. The answer isn’t being less available. It’s changing what helping looks like, so ownership stays with the person who holds the problem.
It feels like good leadership. You’re available, you’re helpful, you care. And in a work culture that wants things fixed yesterday, stepping in can genuinely speed things up, at least in the short term.
But if it becomes the default, good intentions can end up working against you. It removes the chance for someone to work something out, get it a bit wrong, and build the confidence that only comes from doing that themselves.
There are two moments where I see this most often in my work, and neither is about a leader who isn’t up to the job.
The first is leaders operating in genuinely high pressure, fast paced environments, which describes a lot of the people I work with. They value developing their team, coaching people through problems rather than solving them for them. But when the pace never lets up, that intention gets squeezed out by the day-to-day reality.
Somewhere along the way, without quite choosing it, they’ve become stuck in a more directive cycle than they ever wanted to be. It’s often one of the things that frustrates them most, because they know it isn’t how they want to lead.
The second is leaders newer to senior leadership, particularly those who got there by being brilliant doers. The one who could always be relied on to solve it, to fix it, to know the answer. That capability is exactly what got them promoted.
But leading a large team asks for something different to leading your own workload. The shift from “I solve it” to “I build people who can solve it” doesn’t happen automatically just because the title changed.
The risk in both situations is the same. Not that a leader lacks the skill to lead differently, but that conditions make the ‘fix-it default’ the easiest one to reach for. And left unchecked, even a genuinely capable team can slowly drift towards bringing problems rather than solutions, simply because that’s what’s worked, time after time.
What’s worth understanding is that neither half of this pattern is a character flaw.
If people have learned, over time, that escalating a problem gets it handled, then bringing it to you is the rational move. Psychologists call this learned helplessness, a term coined by Martin Seligman. Not laziness, not a lack of capability, but a sensible response to a pattern that’s been reinforced, often without anyone intending it.
Once it takes hold, it doesn’t stay still. It gets modelled downward, layer by layer, until it’s simply how the place works.
And for the leader, the instinct to help isn’t the problem either. What matters is what “helping” turns into under pressure. Psychiatrist Stephen Karpman described this as the Rescuer role in his Drama Triangle: stepping in to solve things out of genuine care, sometimes out of guilt at the thought of not helping.
The intention is good. The effect, over time, quietly does the opposite of what was meant.
It can be easy to assume that support and accountability sit at opposite ends of a scale. Be warmer, and standards slip. Hold the line, and people go quiet.
The research doesn’t back that up.
Amy Edmondson, Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, has spent years studying psychological safety. What her work shows is that safety and accountability reinforce each other rather than compete.
In practice, that means the leaders who navigate this well aren’t choosing between being warm and being demanding. They’re doing both, in the same conversation.
The change isn’t about becoming less available. It’s about changing what “helping” means.
Instead of “let me fix that”, it becomes something much closer to a coaching conversation. Great questions to help them do their thinking on the subject, whilst ensuring ownership stays in the right place – with them.
It doesn’t mean you can’t offer experience, even share advice, but it’s done in a way that keeps accountability clear.
And yes, things might take longer in the short term. But longer term, the wins for all parties are significant.
Leaders in fast-moving, high-pressure environments can sometimes worry that handing ownership back will read as unsupportive, or as a step away from the team. It’s worth remembering the opposite is true.
Absorbing everyone’s problems doesn’t protect people. It keeps them dependent, and it keeps leaders carrying weight that was never theirs to carry alone.
I work with senior leaders often navigating this as part of their load – often without realising it’s contributing to them being spread too thinly, whilst simultaneously holding back a team that’s more than capable of stepping up.
Listening well and handing ownership back aren’t in tension with each other. Done together, they’re what builds the kind of team that can operate brilliantly, whether you’re in the room or not.
Edmondson, A. (2019). The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley.
Deborah Bulcock is an executive coach and strategic partner for senior leaders in large, complex organisations. With 20+ years as a director in banking and nearly a decade coaching directors and executives, she has supported hundreds of leaders navigating life at the top, through new roles, demanding transitions, and the search for greater meaning and impact in their work. She holds ICF PCC accreditation, has won female founder awards, and has authored two books on burnout, resilience, and confidence.
Read more blogs from Deborah – Success to Significance: What Senior Leaders Do Next.
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Executive coach and strategic partner for senior leaders in large, complex organisations