The Over-Functioning Leader Problem (S1E6)

We've spent the last four episodes inside the follower's experience. Today, the camera turns.

Naomi was the kind of leader everyone wanted on their team — present, capable, genuinely caring, and always the first person in the room when something went wrong. Her results were strong. Her team performed. And something was quietly falling apart underneath all of it.

In this episode, Dr. Ashley Newcomb introduces the over-functioning leader — the leader whose most well-intentioned habits are systematically dismantling the engagement, initiative, and ownership of the people around them. She also steps off-script to name something that doesn't get talked about enough: the specific ways that women in leadership, younger leaders, and leaders who fought hardest to earn their place can be most vulnerable to this pattern — and why that matters.

Because the goal of leadership is not to be needed. The goal is to build something that doesn't depend entirely on your presence to function.

🎧 Listen now and grab free resources at inspiredcoaching.net

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Topics covered in this episode:
Over-functioning leadership | Leadership blind spots | Employee autonomy | Organizational Cinderella Syndrome | Organizational Learned Helplessness | Women in leadership | Leadership development | Follower dependency | Organizational resilience | Psychological safety | Servant leadership | Manager vs. leader | Workplace culture | Employee empowerment | Leadership accountability

Keywords:
over-functioning leadership, leadership blind spots, employee autonomy, women in leadership, organizational resilience, follower dependency, Organizational Cinderella Syndrome, Organizational Learned Helplessness, servant leadership, leadership development, workplace culture, employee empowerment, Dr. Ashley Newcomb, The Resilient Organization podcast, Inspired Coaching and Leadership

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:07

When I sit down to write these episodes, I do so from a place of reflection and analysis. Some consultants and coaches will call it a postmortem when you sit back and you look at a project to examine what went right and what went, well, shall we say, less than right. As I was preparing for today's episode and really thinking about what went right and what went sideways with this particular leader, I genuinely smiled with this kind of bittersweet emotion. You see, today's episode isn't about me personally, but it could very easily have been. This could have been a reflection about my time as a leader early in my career. And I think most of us listening will be able to say the same thing or something very similar by the end of today's episode. Today's episode, I want to tell you about a leader that I really do have a lot of respect for. Her name is Naomi. And if you ask the people who worked for Naomi whether she was a good leader, the vast majority of them would tell you yes, absolutely, without hesitation. She was present, she was responsive, she knew her people by name, she knew their families, knew what they were working on and what they were struggling with. She genuinely cared, and that care was real. It wasn't performed, it wasn't a management strategy, it was just who Naomi was at the core of her being. Naomi was also the first person in the room when something went wrong. Before her team had a chance to fully engage with a problem, Naomi already had assessed it, she had already started solving it, already started mapping out the path forward. She didn't do this to show off, she did it because she cared about outcomes and she was really good at what she did. And frankly, it was just faster for her to do it herself. And for a long time, her results reflected that. Her team performed, projects got delivered, numbers came in, and Naomi was the kind of leader that senior management pointed to and said, that, right there, that's what we're looking for. But something was building underneath the surface of Naomi's organization that nobody was talking about. Not because it wasn't real, but because nobody had a name for it yet. And by the time it became visible, it had already cost Naomi and her team more than either of them realized. I'm Dr. Ashley Newcomb, founder of Inspired Coaching and Leadership, and this is the Resilient Organization. And today we're going to talk about one of the most common and most misunderstood ways that well-meaning leaders quietly dismantle the very engagement that they're trying to build, and with that, the resilience that they're trying to build. So over the past five episodes, we've been telling the story from the followers' perspective. We've heard about Dan, whose organization went quiet after the trust broke down. We heard about Jane, whose repeated experience of being passed over, taught her that speaking up just wasn't worth the risk. And about Shannon and Bryson's team who stopped contributing to the bigger picture when the system penalized their integrity. We also heard about Elena, who stopped trying not because she stopped caring, but because the environment had taught her that trying did not produce results and just wasn't worth the emotional energy that she was expending. And finally, last time we talked about Marcus, who was quietly conditioned out of his own autonomy by a leader who needed to be the one with all the answers. In every one of those stories, there was a system at work, a set of conditions, sometimes created by policy, sometimes by culture, sometimes by a single recurring interaction. And that policy or that interaction or that culture, well, it shaped followers to believe what was possible and safe inside of their organization. And we'll talk about psychological safety in future episodes. Today we're going to look at the leader's role in building that system. Not because the leaders are the villains of the story, they're not, but because leaders are the architects. And architects are responsible for what they build, whether they intend every feature or not. And let's be honest, we've all built something where we've looked at the instructions and at the end we were like, where do these extra screws come from? Well, organizational culture is often similar to that in nature. That we do end up with some nuts and bolts that we don't know where they came from. You know, maybe I should have stuck these in here. Maybe they're just extras from the factory. Or maybe when I try to sit in this chair, it's going to completely fall apart. So this episode is for the Naomi's in the room. The leaders who are hardworking, who genuinely care, and who may not yet realize that some of their most habitual, most well-intentioned behaviors are quietly teaching their followers to wait, to defer, and eventually to just stop trying. Let me define what I mean by overfunctioning leadership because I want to be really precise here. This is not about the leaders who work hard. It's not about leaders that are highly capable or deeply involved in their organization's work. Those things are not a problem. Overfunctioning leadership is a specific pattern. It's what happens when a leader consistently and habitually steps into spaces that belong to their followers. When they solve problems that their team is perfectly well capable of solving, but they step in before the team really gets their teeth into the problem. When they make decisions that their people have information and the judgment to make. When they rescue situations before their followers have the chance to engage with the situations, when they rework outputs that were already good enough, or sometimes even better than good enough, because doing it themselves feels faster, it feels safer, and it feels more certain. The catch is that it feels faster and safer and more certain to the leader and not the followers involved. Here's another hard truth about overfunctioning leadership. It almost always comes from a good place. It comes from caring about outcomes. It cares from wanting to protect your team from failure, from a genuine belief that your involvement makes things better. Most overfunctioning leaders are not control freaks. They're actually people who care so deeply and have learned through years of experience that they are good at solving problems. So they solve them. But here's what they're doing, whether they realize it or not. Every single time a leader steps in to solve a problem that a follower was perfectly well capable of solving, they're sending a message. And that message is not, I'm here for you. Unfortunately, the message received by the follower is closer to this. I don't fully trust you to handle this. Whether you intend for that message to come across or not, that's actually what the recipient of the message, that's what your follower perceives. And over time, that message repeatedly, consistently, unintentionally begins to reshape how followers show up. And this is going to cause Cinderella syndrome and learned helplessness a lot of times. The more a leader does, the less the organization becomes. So the more that you do, you step in to intercept these problems, the less organizational resiliency you are fostering. So you're actually tearing down instead of building up. Because here's what followers learn from an overfunctioning leader. They learn to wait. Why should I engage with a problem fully when I know that my leader is going to step in before I finished? The follower learns to escalate the problem. Why should I own a decision when my leadership prefers to be involved anyway? They learn to produce a standard they believe will be reworked, which is often lower than what they're actually capable of. And eventually they learn that their judgment, their initiative, their ownership, these things aren't really needed here. The leader has it covered, which also tears down organizational citizenship behavior, loyalty, and it can cause things like an increase in absenteeism and decrease in morale. And now, added to what we've been building over the last few episodes, I want you to see exactly what that produces because again, this is where it connects directly to organizational Cinderella syndrome and organizational learned helplessness. Just as a quick refresher, OCS is the pattern where capable people develop quiet dependency, waiting to be recognized or rescued, as very commonly seated by overfunctioning leadership. When a leader consistently rescues the follower before that follower has a chance to succeed or fail on their own. And failure sometimes is just as good of a teacher, if not better, than success. They're teaching their follower that rescue is the system, that waiting is the appropriate response, that someone else will handle it. That is the Cinderella dynamic. And it is built by one well-intentioned intervention at a time. And a refresher on organizational learned helplessness, OLH, is the pattern where followers stop trying because effort no longer feels connected to outcome. It's also frequently a byproduct of overfunctioning leadership. When a follower solution gets reworked, when their ideas get absorbed without credit, when their attempts to own a problem get interrupted by a leader who moves faster, they learn that their effort doesn't reliably produce results, or at least the results desired by the organization. And the logical conclusion of that learning is to stop extending the effort. Naomi didn't know she was doing any of this. I want to be clear about that. She was not trying to create dependency, she was not trying to create helplessness on her team. She was trying to lead well. She actually thought that she was leading by example. But impact and intention are two entirely different things, and leaders are responsible for both of those. Okay, look, I want you to hang with me for a second because I want to take a quick detour right here. And I'll be up front. At the risk of stepping on some toes, I'm going to name something that I think is the elephant in the room whenever we talk about overfunctioning leadership. And I'm naming it because I think it matters. I believe it matters. I know it matters. And because I think that not naming this is doing a huge disservice to a lot of people who might be listening to this today and recognizing themselves in Naomi and wondering why. So here it is. A lot of women in leadership, and I do mean a lot, had to fight considerably harder than their male counterparts to get where they are. I'm not trying to be off-putting and I'm not trying to make it sound one-sided or slanted. But the fact is that a lot of women set across from a promotional panel that had the same qualifications as the man sitting next to them in the waiting room. And sometimes the man got the call first, and sometimes our Naomi had to do it two or three times, or had to be demonstrably better just to be considered equally qualified. So if you're a woman in leadership and you're nodding your head right now, I see you. That fight was real. I had to fight it myself. And here's what I've observed not as a judgment, but as a pattern. Sometimes that fight leaves a mark on us. It leaves something behind. It leaves an instinct or a drive or maybe even something unconscious, an unconscious need to prove over and over again that you do belong in the room, that you earned that title, that you are worthy of the position that it took so much of you to get. And sometimes, not always, but sometimes that need to prove yourself can show up as overfunctioning. And doing more, solving more, controlling more, not just because you're trying to undermine your team, but because somewhere deep inside, underneath it all, there's a little voice that hasn't fully accepted yet that you don't have to keep proving it. And sometimes there's an outside voice that keeps coming at you that says that you do need to keep proving it. So I want to say this gently but clearly. That is not a character flaw. That is a very human response to a very real set of experiences. But it's worth naming because the cost of it for your team and honestly for you is significant. Now I'm gonna also say this. I've seen that same pattern in younger leaders who were promoted quickly and are navigating imposter syndrome that can come with that. And that is imposter syndrome. That deep down feeling that, you know, hey, eventually somebody's gonna find out that I didn't earn this or somebody is gonna find out that I didn't deserve this or that I don't know what I'm talking about when you actually do know what you're talking about. That self-doubt that really doesn't belong in the conversation but lives inside us anyway, that is imposter syndrome. And I've seen it in leaders who have gotten their initial opportunity through a connection or a family name, but who genuinely earned every single promotion after that through their hard work and their dedication and who carry quiet pressure to prove that the subsequent success was theirs. That pressure is real too. And it can produce the same pattern and it can produce the same pain. So when I say this episode is for the Naomi, I mean all of you. Whatever brought you to the room, whatever it costs you to get there, this conversation is for you, my friend. Okay, let's get back to Naomi. So let me tell you about the moment that Naomi started to see it. And I mean to really see it. She is preparing for a major presentation to her organization's board. It was high stakes, and it was the kind of moment that required her team's best thinking, not just hers on her own. And Naomi did what she always did. She called her team together, she asked for their input, she listened carefully, and then she went back to her office and built the presentation by herself. She told herself she was synthesizing their ideas, pulling the best threads together into something coherent. And in a technical sense, that was true. Their fingerprints were in there somewhere, and they were very evident. But when the presentation was done and she shared it with her team, something happened that she didn't expect. She was so proud of it and she really thought she knocked it out of the park, but there was very little reaction from her team. There were a few polite comments, there was some nodding, and then the people, they just went back to their desks. Naomi had expected energy. She had expected her team to feel ownership over what they helped create. And that's how she saw it. She saw it as they helped her create it. Instead, what she got was something that looked a lot like indifference, and she didn't understand it. So she did something that took real courage. She asked. She pulled one of her most trusted team members aside, somebody that had been with her for several years, someone she knew would be honest with her. And she said, What did I miss? Why did that land the way that it did? And she had built the rapport with that team member to where the team member actually did tell her gently and carefully, but honestly. She said, Naomi, we've been through this before. We've shared our ideas with you, and then you go off and build something. And what comes back is yours, not ours. And after a while, people stopped feeling like their ideas were going to show up in that final product. So we stopped investing in the process. We stopped showing up because you asked us to. We stopped expecting our contribution to matter. Naomi told me that hearing that was one of the most difficult moments in her leadership career, not because it was said unkindly, because it wasn't, but because she recognized immediately that it was true. You see, at the core of Naomi, she wanted to empower others. She wanted to leave a legacy of caring for others and building other people up. But she realized in that moment that what she had been doing for years was the exact opposite and that she had genuinely not seen it. And then she told me something else. She said the hardest part of hearing it wasn't the feedback itself. It was realizing that part of why she had been doing it was because she never fully trusted that her team's work would be good enough and that that would be a poor reflection on her. Not because they weren't capable, but because she had spent so many years having her own work held to an impossible standard that somewhere along the way, that standard had become the lens through which she evaluated everything, including the people that worked for her, or at least the things that reflected back on her. That's the nature of overfunctioning leadership. It's almost always invisible to the person doing it because from the inside, it feels like caring. It feels like competence, it feels like leadership. The feedback that something is wrong doesn't come in a dramatic moment. It comes in a gradual withdrawal of ideas, of initiatives, of investments that is so slow and so quiet that most leaders never connect it to their own behavior until someone is honest enough to name it. The good news about Naomi is that she was willing to hear it. And that willingness, that moment of genuine openness to feedback that implicated her directly, is where her leadership actually began to deepen. So let's make this personal. This is your reality check, and I want to start by saying something I mean sincerely. If any of what I've described today sounds familiar, that's not an indictment of your character. The leaders most likely to recognize themselves in Naomi's story are often the leaders who care the most. They're the ones who are the most invested, the most capable, the most present. Overfunctioning leadership is frequently the shadow side of genuine dedication. But caring about your people and leading in a way that releases their potential are not automatically the same thing. And that gap is worth looking at honestly. So here are a few questions that I want you to sit with. When someone on your team brings you a problem, what's your default response? Do you ask them how they're thinking about it and then wait for an answer? Or do you find yourself automatically moving toward a solution before they finished even describing the situation? There is no judgment in either answer, but the pattern matters. Think about the last significant piece of work your team produced. How much of that final output reflects their thinking versus your thinking? If your fingerprints are on everything that leaves your team, it's worth asking whether your team has started producing what they think you'll rework rather than what they are actually capable of doing. When's the last time that someone on your team failed at something and you let them learn from their failure rather than stepping in to smooth it over or prevent it? Failure handled well is one of the most powerful tools available to a leader, and it can really have a moment of building psychological safety, but you have to be willing to let your people encounter it. And for many high-caring, high-capability leaders, that's genuinely difficult. It's hard, especially if we care about someone, to let them fail and let them learn from their failures. And here's the one that tends to land the hardest. If you step back, significantly, genuinely step back from the problem solving and the decision making and the rescuing, do you believe your team could handle it? If your honest answer is no or I'm not sure, that's not a reflection of your team's capability. It may be a reflection of what you've taught them to need and expect from you. Because OCS and OLH are not random. They're developed in response to conditions. And leaders, even the best ones, especially the best ones, are often the primary architects of those conditions. That is a hard thing to sit with. And trust me, I know I've sat with it on both sides. I've sat with it as a leader who was overperforming, and I've sat with it as a recipient developing organizational Cinderella syndrome and really had to take some time to recover from that relationship. But this is also one of the most hopeful things that I've said today. Because if you've built the conditions yourselves, then you can rebuild them. If you've joined me on previous podcasts, you know that I'm not going to bring you a problem without bringing some solutions or at least some temporary fixes that can get you to a point to where you can do some reflection and you can put some long-term corrective behaviors in place. So these won't undo years of overfunctioning overnight. Real change here is gradual and it requires sustained intention. Sometimes it requires rebuilding relationships. But if Naomi's story resonated with you, here are three places that you can start today. First, the next time someone brings you a problem, ask before you answer. Before you share your assessment, before you move toward a solution, before you do anything at all. Ask them, what are you thinking about this? And then be quiet, genuinely quiet. Put on our active listening ears long enough for them to actually answer. You are not withholding your expertise. You're creating space for theirs. Remember, as leaders, our job is to build up the next generation of leaders. It's not to gatekeep information and to secure our own personal place by hindering the growth of others. That space is where ownership begins to grow. Second, let the next piece of work go out with their fingerprints, not yours. Find something, one thing that your team produces in the next week or two and resist the urge to rework it. If it's good enough, let it be good enough. If it needs feedback, give the feedback and let them make the changes. What you're signaling is this your work has value as your work, not as raw material for mine. That signal delivered consistently begins to rebuild the belief that their contribution matters. And that's what we're trying to do. Third, create one moment this week where you are visibly a resource rather than a rescuer. When a problem arises, resist the instinct to lead with your solution. Instead, ask, what do you need from me to work through this? You're still present, you're still supportive, you're still the leader, but you're leading in a way that positions your people as the primary agents for their own work. And over time, that positioning is what builds the kind of team that doesn't need to be rescued because they never learn to wait for it. And that, my friends, is organizational resilience. And if you've listened to my segment on organizational Cinderella syndrome, those recommendations should sound pretty familiar because organizational Cinderella syndrome is often tied to overfunctioning leaders. So Naomi made changes, not perfectly, not all at once, but she started asking before she answered. She started letting work go out without reworking it. She started being more deliberate about when she stepped in and why she stepped in. Now her leadership style really was the type that she let her team take credit for the wins and she took the blame for losses, but she really started really sharing the ownership of the projects with her followers. And what came back over time was something that she hadn't seen from her team in years. Ideas started showing up in meetings that hadn't been run through her first. People started owning problems through completion without escalating them to her. So the presentation before the next board meeting, her team built it. She gave feedback, and when it was done, they were proud of it in a way that they hadn't been proud of anything in a long, long time. Naomi told me that the shift required something that she hadn't expected though. It required her to be willing to need her team more than they needed her. And for a leader who had spent years proving that she was capable of handling it all, she had built her entire identity around being competent and present and indispensable. Well, that's genuinely hard. But it was also, she said, one of the most freeing things that she had ever done as a leader. Because again, the goal of leadership is not to be needed. The goal is to build something that doesn't depend entirely on your presence to function. Something with roots deep enough to hold when the storm comes, something built on the full capacity of everybody in the organization, every single person in the organization, not just yours. So in the next episode, we're gonna look at how silence becomes structural, how it stops being a pattern of individual behavior and starts becoming embedded in the systems, the policies, the processes, the fabric of the organization itself. And that's where this is gonna get even more complex and even more important. As always, if today's episode is sitting with you and really kind of hitting you hard, remember that we have resources available to support you at inspiredcoaching.net. This has been the Resilient Organization. Thank you for being here with me, and I'll see you next time.