For many years, I was the leader everyone depended on. I had the answers, remembered the details, solved the problems, and stepped in whenever something was falling through the cracks. If something needed to get done, I usually found a way to make sure it happened.
The truth is, I kind of liked it.
Being needed can make you feel valuable. When people come to you for every decision and depend on you to keep everything moving, it reinforces the idea that you must be doing something right. You feel important to the organization because you are important to almost everything happening within it.
But I eventually began to understand that being needed for everything is not the same as leading well.
When every decision, answer, and responsibility eventually makes its way back to the leader, the organization may remain busy, but it will struggle to become healthy. The leader becomes the person who keeps everything moving, but also the person through whom everything must move. That creates a bottleneck, even when the leader has the best intentions.
It also limits growth. An organization cannot grow beyond the capacity of the person who must approve, solve, remember, or rescue everything. Eventually, there are more decisions than one person can make, more relationships than one person can manage, and more problems than one person can fix.
This is especially common in churches and nonprofits. Leaders often step into the gaps because they care deeply about the mission. They do not want people to be disappointed or important work to be neglected. Over time, however, stepping into every gap can quietly teach everyone else that the leader will always be there to catch what gets dropped.
That may feel like faithful leadership, but it is not healthy leadership.
Healthy leadership does not make the leader less valuable. It changes where that value is found. Instead of being valuable because everything depends on you, you become valuable because you are developing people, clarifying responsibility, building dependable systems, and creating an organization capable of carrying the mission together.
That is a much stronger and more sustainable kind of leadership.
Research Recognizes the Risk
The Bridgespan Group’s Organizational Development Assessment Guide describes an organization with little delegation and no effective second level of leadership as completely dependent on its executive director. At the strongest level, appropriate work is delegated, capable second-tier leadership is in place, and the organization is prepared to continue through a future leadership transition.
That is an important distinction.
A strong organization is not simply one with a strong leader. It is one that has developed the clarity, leadership capacity, and operating systems needed to function without requiring the leader’s involvement in everything.
Research from Gallup also demonstrates how important clarity is. Gallup reported that only 45 percent of employees strongly agreed that they knew what was expected of them at work. Gallup has also found that managers account for 70 percent of the variation in team engagement.
When expectations and ownership are unclear, people naturally return to the leader for answers. Every unanswered question, undefined responsibility, and uncertain priority travels back up the organization.
The leader eventually becomes the place where all uncertainty goes.
BoardSource has identified the same danger when founding executives leave organizations. If the organization’s identity, relationships, knowledge, and direction remain concentrated in one person, a leadership transition can reduce effectiveness, disrupt programs, and even threaten the organization’s survival.
That is not merely a succession problem. It is an everyday leadership problem.
If the organization could not function without you six months from now, it is probably depending too heavily on you today.
How Do You Know When the Organization Depends Too Much on You?
You can often see the dependency in ordinary moments. People regularly wait for your approval on decisions they should be able to make. You are the only person who knows the status of important work. Assignments are discussed, but you must repeatedly remind people to complete them. Meetings, projects, or programs lose momentum when you are absent. Taking meaningful time away creates anxiety because you expect problems to accumulate while you are gone.
None of this automatically means you have the wrong people. It may mean your people do not have enough clarity, ownership, authority, or operating structure to succeed without your constant intervention.
The usual advice is, “You need to delegate more.”
That may be true, but delegation is not simply giving someone a task. Healthy delegation requires clarity about the outcome, the owner, the authority that person has, when progress will be reviewed, and what successful completion looks like.
Without those answers, delegation can become little more than handing someone a responsibility while the leader continues carrying all the uncertainty. The task may leave your desk, but the mental weight does not.
You still wonder whether the person understood the assignment. You still feel responsible for remembering the deadline. You still expect that you may have to step in and rescue the work. Technically, you delegated the task, but you never really transferred ownership.
Begin With One Area
You do not have to restructure the entire organization this week. Begin with one responsibility that repeatedly returns to you. It might be preparing a meeting, communicating with volunteers, tracking a project, following up with donors, ordering supplies, or making a recurring operational decision.
Identify who should own it. Clearly explain the result that person is responsible for producing. Make sure the person understands which decisions can be made without coming back to you. Then establish a reasonable time to review progress.
Do not merely assign the work. Transfer appropriate ownership and create a dependable rhythm for follow-through.
That is how organizational dependence begins to decrease.
The goal is not to make the leader unnecessary. The organization still needs leadership. People need direction, support, accountability, and encouragement. Some decisions should remain with the executive director, pastor, or senior leader.
The goal is to make the organization less fragile.
A healthy organization should benefit from the leader’s presence without being endangered by the leader’s absence. It should be able to carry responsibilities, make appropriate decisions, and continue meaningful work without everything passing through one person.
Strong leaders do not prove their value by remaining indispensable to every activity. They build clarity, develop people, distribute responsibility, and establish rhythms that allow the mission to continue without requiring them to hold every piece together.
If everything depends on you, the next step is not to work harder.
It is to help your organization learn how to carry the mission with you.
In the next edition of Leading with ANCHOR, we will look at how unclear ownership creates unnecessary work and why your organization may not need more people as much as it needs clearer responsibility.
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Learn more at https://www.theanchormodel.com.
Research Referenced
The Bridgespan Group, Organizational Development Assessment Guide
https://www.bridgespan.org/getmedia/5bd1f2e4-ca88-4f88-9fe9-ba4d4c852305/organisational-development-assessment-guide.pdf
Gallup, The Great Detachment: Why Employees Feel Stuck
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/653711/great-detachment-why-employees-feel-stuck.aspx
BoardSource, Nonprofit Founder Departures
https://boardsource.org/nonprofit-founder-departures-five-challenges-five-novel-solutions-3/