Why your best managers are drowning and what it’s costing you
Your high-potential managers are struggling. Not because they lack capability, but because they’re trapped in a leadership paradox that’s destroying their effectiveness and burning them out.
Working with organisations across every industry reveals the same brutal pattern: your best individual contributors become your most overwhelmed managers. The very skills that earned their promotion are now sabotaging their success – and your business results.
The Expertise Trap That’s Killing Productivity
Your newly promoted mid-senior managers are working 60-hour weeks while their teams sit idle waiting for direction. They’re the first to arrive, last to leave, and constantly interrupted because “only they know how to do it right.” Meanwhile, strategic projects gather dust and team capability stagnates.
Most organisations reward this behaviour. You celebrate the manager who stays late to fix the client crisis. You promote the person who has all the answers. You measure them on immediate results, not team development. Your performance reviews ask “What did you achieve?” not “What did your team achieve without you?”
This creates expertise addicts. Managers get dopamine hits from being needed, from solving problems, from being the hero. Their identity becomes tied to being indispensable.
Stop measuring managers on what they do. Start measuring them on what happens when they’re not there.
Implement “manager absence metrics.” Track team performance when the manager is on leave, in meetings, or unavailable. High-performing teams should maintain 85% effectiveness without their manager present. If they can’t, the manager isn’t leading – they’re doing.
Create “expertise transfer quotas.” Every manager must document and transfer one critical skill to a team member each quarter. Not delegation – actual capability transfer where the team member can teach others.
The Altitude Problem Destroying Strategic Thinking
Your managers are mental ping-pong balls. One minute they’re reviewing operational reports, the next they’re in strategic planning sessions, then back to solving customer complaints. They’re exhausted from constant context switching and making poor decisions because they can’t think clearly about anything.
You’re scheduling them into oblivion. Back-to-back meetings that jump from tactical to strategic without transition time. You expect them to switch from reviewing yesterday’s numbers to planning next year’s strategy in the same breath.
Most organisations make this worse by treating all decisions as equally urgent. Everything is a priority, so nothing is. Managers develop learned helplessness – they stop trying to think strategically because the operational demands never stop.
Create “altitude blocks” in your managers’ calendars. Not just time blocking – cognitive altitude blocking.
Monday mornings: 30,000-foot strategic thinking only. No operational decisions, no tactical problems, no immediate fires. If the building isn’t literally burning, it waits until Tuesday.
Wednesday afternoons: Ground-level operational focus. All the tactical decisions, team issues, and immediate problems get handled in concentrated blocks.
Friday afternoons: 10,000-foot review and planning. What worked this week? What needs adjustment? What’s coming next week?
Train your managers to say: “That’s a Tuesday problem” or “That’s a Monday conversation.” Protect their cognitive altitude like you’d protect their physical safety.
The Delegation Dilemma That Creates Bottlenecks
Your managers are organisational bottlenecks disguised as hard workers. Every decision flows through them. Every approval sits on their desk. Teams wait for their input while opportunities slip away. You’ve created single points of failure throughout your organisation.
You’re teaching delegation backwards. Most training focuses on “how to delegate tasks” when the real problem is managers don’t know how to delegate thinking.
They delegate the doing but keep the deciding. They hand over the work but retain the authority. Team members become task executors, not problem solvers. When something goes wrong, it still lands back on the manager’s desk.
Your promotion criteria make this worse. You promote people who “get things done” not people who “get things done through others.” You reward individual achievement over team capability building.
Teach “decision delegation” not task delegation. Create decision-making levels that your managers must respect.
Level 1: Team member decides and acts (routine operational decisions) Level 2: Team member decides, informs manager after (non-routine but low-risk decisions) Level 3: Team member recommends, manager decides (significant impact decisions) Level 4: Manager decides with team input (strategic or high-risk decisions)
The key: managers cannot override Level 1 or 2 decisions unless there’s genuine risk. If they keep pulling decisions back up, they lose the right to delegate them down.
Track “decision velocity” – how quickly decisions get made at each level. Slow Level 1 decisions indicate micromanagement. Too many Level 4 decisions indicate under-delegation.
The Leadership Pipeline That’s Built for Yesterday
Your leadership pipeline might be optimised for a world that no longer exists. Your managers have succeeded in stable, predictable environments where the playbook was clear and the rules didn’t change mid-game. They’ve built their confidence on knowing what comes next.
But that world is gone. Economic volatility, technological disruption, and shifting workforce expectations have created a new reality. Your managers are like Formula One drivers who’ve only ever raced on straight tracks – technically skilled but unprepared for the corners ahead.
The problem runs deeper than skills gaps. Your development programs are teaching peacetime leadership to people who need wartime capabilities. Case studies from successful companies, best practices from stable industries, frameworks that assume predictable outcomes. You’re preparing them for the last war, not the next one.
Your promotion criteria compound this issue. You elevate people based on past performance in past conditions. The manager who excelled when budgets were growing and markets were stable might crumble when resources get tight and uncertainty increases. But you won’t discover this until the pressure hits.
Consider creating “controlled adversity” in your leadership development. Resist the urge to rescue or redirect when people are challenged. Instead, debrief ruthlessly and regularly. What assumptions proved wrong? How did they adapt their approach? What would they do differently? The learning happens in the struggle, not the success.
Your future leaders need to build tolerance for ambiguity and confidence in their ability to navigate without a map. They need to learn that leadership isn’t about having all the answers – it’s about making good decisions with incomplete information.
When you are ready to find out more, here are a few ways you can connect with me
- Tired of leadership advice that doesn’t work in the real world? → Get practical insights that actually work
- Stuck in the leadership weeds and can’t see a way out? → Book your 1:1 Strategic Breakthrough Session
- Ready to reclaim 6+ hours weekly and lead with confidence instead of firefighting in chaos? → Discover Amplify
- Exhausted from your team needing constant oversight and direction? → Transform them with WoW
- Burning out from leadership overwhelm? → Get the antidote (my book)
