Have you ever worked harder on someone’s job than they did?
I ask because after more than a decade of coaching, I’ve come to believe that the most common leadership problem I run into isn’t neglect. It’s the opposite. It’s good people who care a great deal, work very hard on behalf of their teams, and can’t understand why those teams keep getting weaker.
I recently had a session with a client who held a pretty senior-level position at his firm. He’s been there a long time, and he opened by telling me he was still learning how to delegate. Then he said something I hear all the time.
“A lot of what I tell myself is that I’m trying to support the people who work with me. And it means that sometimes I have to do things they should be doing.”
So I asked him what that looked like in practice.
He told me that he schedules his own one-on-ones and follows up with others to make sure they attend. He walks in carrying the running list of projects that belong to the person he’s meeting with, and wonders why they only discuss the ones he remembers. And when a project stalls, the owner calls him, not the person doing the work. He had just spent two days waiting for a direct report to follow up with a client, and when it didn’t happen, he took the man’s email, rewrote it, and sent it himself.
“I inserted myself into the process again,” he said.
Here is what I told him. You think you’re being of service. You think you’re being kind and supportive, and I’m not saying you’re a bad person. But what you’re calling support isn’t support. It’s enabling.
He got quiet for a moment. Then he said, “your right and I do this all the time.”
Support and enabling look identical from the inside
That’s what makes this one so difficult to catch in ourselves. The behavior is the same, the intention is the same, and only the effect is different.
I think about it the way I think about a spotter in a weight room. A good spotter stands close, pays attention, and makes it safe for you to attempt more weight than you would ever dare to lift alone. He doesn’t touch the bar, because if he did so, he would take away the benefit of the struggle, and you walk out of the gym exactly as strong as you were when you walked in, because the strain he let you feel was the entire point.
That is what enabling costs us. When we do someone’s work for them, we aren’t just taking a task off their plate. We’re taking the consequence off it too, and the consequence is what teaches.
Stephen Karpman described this pattern back in 1968 in what he called the drama triangle, and the position he named the Rescuer is the one worth knowing. The Rescuer is the person who steps in to help and who quietly needs to be needed. Rescuing looks generous from the outside, and it feels generous from the inside. It holds the other person in the role of someone who can’t manage on their own.
And here is why what we call this problem matters.
If we call it a delegation problem, we look for a better way to hand off tasks and treat it as a process issue.
If we call it a performance problem, we look for the person who isn’t delivering and treat it as a people issue.
If we call it as we see it, which is a leader doing the work that belongs to someone else, it becomes an obvious mindset issue, and our mindset can change.
The third one is almost always the right read.
Support means making sure someone has what they need to carry the work. Enabling means carrying it for them.
A few signs we’ve crossed that line:
- We’re the one who remembers. We hold the list of projects that belong to somebody else.
- The client calls us instead of the person actually doing the work.
- We wait for someone to do something, and when they don’t, we quietly do it ourselves and tell ourselves it was faster.
- We describe our job as supporting the team more often than we describe it as leading them.
The Subtle Shift
Recognize when you are mistaking support for enabling.
A subtle distinction separates the two, and it pays to understand it.
The test I use is a single question.
“Will what I’m about to do make this person more capable of handling it next time, or will it just make this particular problem go away?”
Most of us know the answer before we finish asking.
