Dear Dispatch Reader,
I can still see the hallway outside my office. It was another eighty hour week, and there were people lined up waiting to talk to me. Every one of them was bringing me a problem that was theirs to solve. They did not want my help thinking it through. They wanted me to take the accountability for it.
I remember being frustrated. Then I remember the thought that landed underneath the frustration, which was considerably less comfortable. This was not something they were doing to me. I was the common denominator. I had trained them to do this.
Years earlier, when I was newer in the deputy superintendent role, a leadership coach named John had already told me exactly this. He said that when I learned to stop being a lifeguard and start being a swim coach, I would be a much more powerful leader.
I nodded. I understood the metaphor immediately, or I thought I did. The lifeguard is in the water doing the swimming for you. The coach is at the side of the pool, watching, letting you struggle through the strokes that eventually make you capable.
Then I went back to work and changed nothing at all, for years.
The pattern that earns you the seat is often the same pattern that keeps everyone around you from growing into theirs.
The Lens
The lifeguard pattern is not a character flaw. It is a promotion engine.
I was a fixer, and I was good at it. I processed quickly, moved to solutions before other people were ready to land on them, spoke up, decided, carried weight. That pattern got me promoted, and each new role rewarded it again.
Nobody develops the rescuing habit by accident. You build it because it works, and the organization keeps paying you for it, and eventually it stops being something you do and becomes something you are.
Then COVID hit. I was helping navigate a school system of 40,000 students and 7,000 employees, and in that environment being a lifeguard was exactly right. Somebody had to be in the water. What I did not see at the time was that the crisis was quietly validating a pattern I already had.
Bringing everyone back afterward was harder than the height of the pandemic, in my view. And somewhere in that stretch I started to notice that the behavior which had been essential during the crisis had become disempowering to my team outside of it. Same leader, same instincts, entirely different effect.
I was in my own coaching then, working through an immunity to change process. As I built the map of what I was actually resistant to, the easy answers came first, and I believed all of them. I have higher standards. The work is too important. They are not ready.
Each one fell away as I stayed with the question. What surfaced underneath was harder. I was terrified of releasing control. I was terrified of being wrong. I genuinely believed the system would collapse if I were not in there making things happen.
So the lifeguard question was never about time management or delegation. It was about identity. Being the good, responsible leader had become indistinguishable from being valuable, and I could not tell where one ended and the other began.
The cost runs in both directions. The leader depletes, which is the part people talk about. The organization stays dependent, which shows up three years later in a succession conversation that goes nowhere, or a leave you cannot take, or a strategy that stalls whenever you are pulled elsewhere. Your organization's capacity gets capped at your availability. That is an enterprise risk, not a personal one.
I want to be careful here, because this idea fails in a specific way.
Sometimes the right move is to get in the water. My own crisis years are the proof. A leader who reads one article about delegation and decides she is now a swim coach has often just found a more respectable word for absence.
So the question is not which one you are. Two executives can make the identical decision to step in, and for one it is a clear read on what the moment requires, and for the other it is an inability to tolerate watching someone struggle. Same action, entirely different leadership. The discernment is in knowing which one is running you, and the crisis version is the harder case, because the pattern always has a good reason available.
What eventually changed was not insight. It was practice. I climbed down out of the lifeguard stand and started coaching from the sideline. I let people struggle and sometimes fail. I helped them get their stroke back, and I let them start in the shallow end before they went off the diving board. Most importantly, I held my ego aside and recognized that responsibility was in the doing but in the developing.
By the time I left that role, I had a group of senior leaders who stated what they intended to do, held responsibility for it, and were genuinely all right having some missteps and learning along the way.
I also got roughly forty hours a week back. It returned to me through fewer emails (stopped being copied on everyone's email), focused check-ins that empowered ownership and accountability, and better boundaries (stopped answering texts and phone calls across the evening and weekend unless they were absolute emergencies meaning a fire, gas leak, or life threatening incident).
I offer that number because it is the part leaders find hardest to believe. It is also the smaller half of what changed. The larger half was a team that no longer needed me to be the point of failure.
What I would leave you with is not the question of whether you are a lifeguard. It is a quieter one. What is your jumping in protecting you from?
Clear Eyes. Full Hearts Practices
Bring one specific instance to mind. The last time you stepped in on something that belonged to someone else.
Ask what would actually have happened if you had not jumped in and taken over. Catch yourself creating the stories of catastrophe or a slower pace. What would realistically have happened if you paused and asked questions of your direct report or colleague? What if you had held the space for them to lead it their way and be supported in navigating the results? What if you led through curiosity instead of certainty?
Then ask what you believe would have come back to you if that person had failed visibly. This one is uncomfortable because it is usually more about our ego than the real results of the situation. The answer to this question helps us understand our pattern and where it lives.
A sentence to say out loud to your team this month:
"One of my strengths is stepping in when something starts to wobble, and it becomes a limitation when I do it before you have had the chance to work it through yourself. I am working on staying at the side of the pool. Tell me when I have taken something that was yours."
Then be genuinely willing to hear the answer, because the invitation only works if it is real.
Invitation
I spend most of my week in conversations like this one, with executives carrying more than the role actually requires and no clear sense of how to put any of it down without something breaking.
Your invitation, should you choose to accept it, is a conversation. Not a pitch and not an assessment. Just time to think out loud with someone who has sat in the seat.
Schedule an executive consultation.
Clear eyes. Full hearts.
Paula
P.S. If this landed personally rather than professionally, Lynsey and I are hosting Audaciously Unapologetic October 15 through 18 at CIVANA in Arizona. It is a small retreat for women leaders who want enough distance from the demands to hear themselves think again. We built it out of our own leadership, not out of theory. Readers of the Dispatch have a VIP invitation with a discount that holds through September 1. I write about the retreat separately on Wednesdays if you would rather get it in pieces, and you can book time with me directly if you want to talk it through.
P.P.S. That consultation link is open even if you have nothing you are trying to solve. Some of my best conversations start with someone who just wanted to reconnect, or who has been reading for a while and we have never actually met. That counts as a reason.
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