The Striving Trap

Under pressure, many leaders make the decision to take on more personally. This might look like a founder heading into a fundraiser who decides she has to review every slide, every number, and every email to a partner because the stakes feel too high to hand off. Or a leader in the middle of a reorganization who finds themselves sitting in on meetings that the team is equipped to handle because there is fear that something might fall through the cracks.

When I talk through this with clients, what they share is their deep commitment to their customers and outcomes, not doubt in the people around them. Moving fast personally can feel like a way to keep a launch, deadline, or a big moment on track, and there’s some truth to that. Speed and precision matter.

But I want to highlight the second decision available to leaders that is chosen less often, especially when the stakes are high. It is building a structure for sustainability. This requires us to challenge our own beliefs about what the team is capable of and a willingness to see things done differently. This takes longer to set up, and it rarely feels as urgent as the first one, yet it’s almost always the one that leads to long term growth.

For example, a client faced this exact decision in the middle of the biggest launch the company had ever done. The stakes were as high as they could be: months of preparation, a big public-facing launch, and the pressure of getting it right. In this situation, our instincts often push us towards doing more ourselves.

She realized that this moment called for something different. It called for an opportunity to expand into the next level of her leadership.

Instead of starting with the comfort of control, we started with what was already true about her leadership and her team.

She had a team that had delivered for her before, and a track record of trusting her own instincts when it mattered the most. We used that information to help identify the gap between how she was leading in that moment and the leader she was building toward, which was someone who could hold the full vision (and accountability) without needing to hold every decision.

Rather than taking on every key activity herself, she named her team’s strengths one by one, and started handing off the pieces each person was capable of owning. It took work, it took alignment, and it took asking the same question about almost everything on the to-do list: does this need to be you? Or does it need to be done by someone who is best to deliver this for the long term?

Together, we spent our sessions naming who already owned the tasks on her to-do list in their day-to-day roles. Once those strengths had names, handing off the work stopped feeling like a leap, it started feeling like the obvious next step. She knew the vision and so did her team, they just needed to be trusted with it. A team can only run with their piece of the vision if they can actually see the whole of it.

By launch week, her fingerprints were still on every major decision, and most importantly, so were those of her team. She was in the room making the calls only she could make, while her team ran the pieces that were genuinely theirs to run. She built something that could carry weight, and the launch was wildly successful as a result.

Painting the vision clearly, and trusting the team to deliver is a leadership skill in its own right, not a consolation prize for stepping back.

Being a leader can often feel synonymous with being able to do everything, even at the cost of the sustainability and the expanded leadership capacity you are working to build toward. Sustainability is what allows ambition to survive past the current sprint, so you can run the marathon with confidence in your capacity, your team, and the structure you’ve built around you.

Your Weekly Practice

1. Name one activity you’re currently doing yourself that actually belongs to someone else on your team, and what’s kept you holding onto it.

The pattern we started with this week shows up everywhere, including the small, routine pieces of your day.

Name one activity that you’re currently working on yourself that actually belongs to someone else on your team. Then get curious about what’s kept you holding onto it. Comfort, speed, and habit are all common reasons, and naming the reason is often what starts to make the handoff possible.

2. Write a one-sentence version of your vision, then check whether you’ve actually said it out loud this week.

Painting the vision clearly was the move that carried our client through launch week, and it’s worth questioning why it can be difficult.

Many leaders carry a detailed picture of where they’re headed, but the catch is that clarity in your own head doesn’t automatically become clarity for anyone else. The mindset shift is moving from assuming the vision is obvious because you can see it, to treating repetition as part of the job. Share it constantly – in meetings, standups, and one-on-one conversations..

This week, write the one sentence vision you want your team building toward. Then, check whether you’ve actually said it out loud this week, or just assumed it was already understood.

3. Pick one team member’s strength you haven’t fully leveraged yet, and hand them one concrete piece of a current project built around it.

Naming her team’s strengths one by one is what allowed our client to hand off pieces of the launch with confidence.

Pick one team member’s strengths you haven’t fully leveraged. Then hand them one concrete piece of a current project built around it andnd size it so they can fully own it. This becomes an opportunity to foster your team’s strengths and give them the confidence to handle tasks without your oversight.