The persistent voice whispering that you should be across everything. Waking up at 3am with rolling thoughts about all the stuff you have to fix. Checking Slack one last time before you hit the sack. The urge to put out every fire you see.
That's your overdeveloped sense of responsibility at play, a particularly moreish flavour of self-imposed martyrdom where every problem needs your attention and solving everyone's challenges feels like your personal mission.
You're not alone of course. Leaders and founders of all shapes and sizes transform themselves into some sort of organisational Atlas, destined to carry an impossible weight on their increasingly tired shoulders.
The Inevitable Cost of Keeping It All Together
Take a typical moment in a typical day...
You're simultaneously tagged in five different Slack channels, are silently hoping there's nothing truly urgent in the mountain of unread emails, and are in two meetings (one physically, one mentally). Your calendar feels like a game of Tetris so you carve out ever smaller pieces of time, bouncing between calls and conversations while mentally solving that crisis you just heard about.
The impact?
Your ability to see the bigger picture is limited to what you can glimpse in the gaps between the minutiae.
Your impact lessens as you become more and more spread thin, making you want to solve more problems in the hope that means more impact.
You absorb stress like a sponge because there isn't time or space to actually deal with it.
And you keep putting yourself at the very bottom of your priorities because you just have to keep going and push through, right?
The more threadbare your superhero cape becomes, the higher the cost to the quality of your work, your relationships, your health and even your sense of self.
What If?
An overdeveloped sense of responsibility will lead you to mediocrity and burnout, but what if you didn't have to carry it all?
Imagine this alternate timeline:
- You understand that your value isn't in doing it all or solving it all
- You delegate not just projects or tasks, but entire problems and their solutions
- You have bandwidth for thinking, creativity, experimentation and most importantly, for YOU
- You experience more flow and more joy because there's room to be at your best instead of that closed off feeling of stress
- Your team grows stronger because they're solving things themselves
- You don't have to bury yourself under a mountain of resilience
- You remember what matters to you and the reasons you're in this
Newsflash: you really don't have to carry it all.
And Here's The Hard Bit
You've been doing this a long time, and while unlearning a deep pattern of behaviour is equal parts tough and uncomfortable, it's eminently doable.
- 1Start by acknowledging that your overdeveloped sense of responsibility isn't actually helping; it's just a dependency and a bottleneck with your name and face.
- 2Then see the real reason you've been doing this. For some, it's the adrenaline rush of solving everything and being needed everywhere—that feeling of being indispensable is addictive. For others, it's the shadow of fear that warns you of disaster if you take your eye off the ball or leave it to others. Behind it all is that same deep-seated human insecurity—that you might not be good enough.
- 3Practice the art of strategic attention. Not everything needs your attention, maybe not right now and maybe not at all. You can decide where to lean in, where to apply your focus and talents, what you delegate, what you park and even what you ignore.
- 4Dump those outdated assumptions, like being a successful leader means you have to be across everything, or that you stay in good favour with people by solving their problems.
Letting Go As A Rite of Passage
I've been there too, trying to absorb all of the problems and stress while keeping all the plates spinning so my team didn't have to.
It's understanding that your real value isn't in being everywhere, but in choosing where you apply that value.
So the question isn't whether your overdeveloped sense of responsibility should be over and done with, it's whether you're ready and willing to lead in a way that's actually sustainable for everyone, including yourself.