It wasn’t that long ago that I was leading a team and managing a long list of client accounts. We had talented people. Smart people. People I genuinely trusted.
Or at least I thought I did.
I met with the clients, understood their goals, and built the strategies. My team did the research, created the content, managed communities, and kept everything moving. They were diligent, creative, and more than capable.
Still, I was convinced that: “It’s just faster if I do it myself.” It wasn’t.
At the time, it felt responsible. I thought I was protecting the clients and making sure the work met my standards. Looking back, I can see I was also protecting myself from letting go.
Every time I stepped in, I took away an opportunity for someone else to grow. They couldn’t build the judgment, confidence, or experience I wanted them to have because I wasn’t giving them room to develop it.
The meetings and the decisions multiplied, the emails and the hours too. I figured that was simply the price of being a leader. Until one day, I snapped.
It wasn’t over anything major. A client had pointed out a fairly insignificant mistake. It was easily fixed, but I had nothing left in the tank. I walked out of the office because I knew if I stayed, I was going to unload my frustration on someone who probably didn’t deserve it.
A little while later, my senior leader came to find me. She wasn’t angry or disappointed. She just said, in that kind but unmistakably firm voice, “Janet, you need to delegate or you’re going to burn out. It’s not helping us, and it’s not helping your clients.”
She was right. She usually was. At the time, I thought she was talking about delegation. It took me nearly ten years to realize she was really talking about capacity.
She saw something I couldn’t. I had become the bottleneck because I believed I had to carry everything myself.
Back then, slowing down felt unproductive. Lazy. Almost disconnected from my mission. There was always another strategy to write, another client to call, another problem to solve. If I wasn’t moving, I worried I wasn’t carrying my weight.
In retrospect, I see I was performing for the sake of performing. I wasn’t creating more value. I was creating more activity. More busy.
Our industry rewarded that thinking. Long hours were a badge of honor. Busy calendars meant you were important. We fell into the push, push, push mentality without ever asking if it was actually helping us do better work.
It wasn’t. It made me tired. It made me reactive. It limited the people around me.
Vacations weren’t the answer either. They were exhausting. I’d work twice as hard before I left so nothing fell through the cracks. I’d spend the trip checking email because I couldn’t disconnect. Then I’d come home to an overflowing inbox and spend another week catching up. That’s not recovery. Real recovery happens long before you book the flight.
Real recovery looks waaay different than I thought back then, it’s:
- Trusting someone else to lead the meeting.
- Leaving a little white space in your calendar instead of filling every available minute.
- Taking a real lunch instead of eating over your keyboard.
- Walking around the block before answering the email that raises your blood pressure.
- Balancing periods of intense effort with intentional recovery instead of expecting one vacation to fix months of chronic stress.
Today, when I work with leaders, I talk a lot about capacity. Capacity is more than time on your calendar. It’s your ability to think clearly when the pressure is on, to listen before reacting, to trust your people, and to make thoughtful decisions instead of hurried ones.
Protecting your capacity isn’t selfish. It’s part of the job. And protecting your team’s capacity matters just as much.
When people have room to think, recover, experiment, and occasionally make mistakes, they grow. They feel more confident. They develop judgment instead of simply following instructions. They learn new skills because someone trusted them enough to let them try. That’s how people flourish, and it’s how organizations do too.
The best leaders don’t carry the most. They protect the capacity that allows everyone to do their best work. Their own and their team’s.
You’ll all think more clearly, trust more easily, and discover that work flows better when people aren’t running on empty.