It usually starts with the best of intentions.
Someone comes into your office with a problem. A client is unhappy. A deadline is slipping. Two members of the team aren’t getting on. A supplier has let them down.
You’re experienced, and you can see what needs to happen. And, frankly, you could probably sort it out in ten minutes. So you do – problem solved.
Except that you may just have created a much bigger one.
Because every time you take responsibility for solving someone else’s problem, you risk teaching them something you never intended to teach…
When things get difficult, accountability moves upwards.
Let’s imagine Darren works in your sales team.
At the end of another disappointing month, Darren explains that he has missed his target because several customers haven’t paid their invoices. “It’s completely outside my control,” he says. “The work was delivered. The invoices went out. What else can I do?”
You have several choices.
You could sympathise. You could give him the benefit of your experience: “When I was in sales, I always made sure…”
Or you could rescue him: “Leave it with me. I’ll speak to Finance.”
All perfectly understandable responses. And none of them requires Darren to take much responsibility for changing the situation.
Next month, when it happens again, where do you think he’ll go?
Straight back to you.
The trouble with being helpful
This is one of the great paradoxes of leadership: the more capable and helpful you are, the easier it is to create people who depend upon you – and not just the underperformers.
- A manager tells you that one of their people is difficult to manage, so you have a quiet word.
- Someone is struggling with a demanding client, so you take over the next meeting.
- Two colleagues have fallen out, so you become the go-between.
- A decision is taking too long, so you make it.
Each intervention makes perfect sense on its own. But repeat the pattern often enough and something changes: problems start travelling upwards.
Meanwhile, you become increasingly frustrated that nobody seems prepared to take responsibility.
The uncomfortable question is: have you trained them not to?
Are you supporting – or rescuing?
There is a useful idea here from Stephen Karpman’s Drama Triangle, a model originally developed to describe dysfunctional patterns in relationships.
It identifies three roles: Victim, Persecutor and Rescuer. And the interesting one for leaders is often the Rescuer.
The Rescuer looks like the good guy, surely? They help. They smooth things over. They solve problems. They protect people from difficult situations.
But rescuing can reinforce dependency: by repeatedly solving somebody else’s problem, you implicitly treat them as less capable of solving it themselves.
That distinction matters enormously in organisations.
Supporting somebody builds their capability. Rescuing them substitutes yours for theirs.
A supportive leader might ask Fred:
- “What have you done about it so far?”
- “What part of this situation is within your control?”
- “What conversations could you have with those clients?”
- “What do you think needs to change next month?”
- “What do you need from me?”
That last question is particularly important, because this isn’t an argument for abandoning people to sink or swim. Sometimes they genuinely do need your authority, experience, resources or support.
But there is a world of difference between helping someone solve their problem and making their problem yours.
Accountability needs consequences
There is another uncomfortable aspect to rescuing: if every wobble is caught by somebody further up the organisation, people never experience the consequences of their own decisions.
It doesn’t mean creating a blame culture or allowing a major client relationship to collapse just to teach someone a lesson. It means allowing people to wrestle with difficulties, make judgements, occasionally get things wrong, and learn to put them right.
That’s how capability develops.
If you constantly step in before that can happen, you may get a better short-term result. But you also remain indispensable.
And as your organisation grows, that becomes a serious problem. The founder rescues the directors. The directors rescue the managers. The managers rescue their teams.
Before long you have an organisation full of busy, well-intentioned people working one level below where they ought to be. As a client once said to me, “I’m the highest-paid spell-checker in the business!”
Leave the monkey where it belongs
Someone walks into your office with a monkey on their back – a problem, a difficult decision, something they are accountable for.
You listen sympathetically; you discuss it; you suggest some possibilities. They walk out feeling much better.
And somehow the monkey is now sitting on your desk!
Watch for that moment. Your job as a leader isn’t to refuse to help. It’s to make sure that your help leaves the other person more capable and more accountable, not less.
So next time someone arrives carrying a monkey, resist the temptation to take it from them.
Help them work out what they’re going to do with it.
And make sure that when they leave your office, they’re still carrying it!