When being indispensable becomes a liability
Why the ego trap gets harder to see the more senior you become
“I don’t know why I bother. Everything I share with him comes back with a thousand redlines. It doesn’t even resemble my work anymore. Even an email — he has an opinion about everything. And nothing is good enough.”
As the EVP listened during the skip-level meeting, she struggled with what to do.
One of her most senior leaders was struggling. The VP was one of the most promising hires on her team. But his team was stifled by his approach — constant redoing of work, checking in at every step. Some had already left. Those who remained were fearful and deflated.
She hired him because he was so well respected in the industry. Everyone agreed, he wasn’t just brilliant, he was the future.
None of the interviews and reference checks revealed what would happen after he came on board. He wouldn’t just bring his acumen; he would also bring a set of standards and corresponding behaviors that were unsustainable, for him and for his team.
What made him dramatically successful as an individual contributor had become just as dramatic a limitation to his ability to lead.
The EVP didn’t have an answer yet. Neither, it turned out, did the VP.
That question — what to do — is what brought her to me.
The ego trap
It’s natural to connect your identity with your achievements. And early in your career, it is what helps you get ahead.
For me, early on, it was essential that I held on to every success because I needed evidence to build my confidence and my courage. It didn’t feel like feeding my ego because my insecurities felt so much more dangerous — they were the bigger risk to my career. I needed to stop questioning myself in order to take on bigger assignments, greater challenges, and responsibilities that required new skills.
Without achievement, I would have been left floundering in the uncertainty and the stress of whether I would hit my targets, get recognized, and have more opportunities for growth.
When we start to see measurable progress, our brains register it as evidence that we can do the work and succeed. Over time, it builds our confidence. This is essential to our ability to seek out more complex work, higher-stakes mandates, and greater scope and responsibility. Our prior successes give us the evidence that we can do more, be more.
The challenge is when we start to conflate our successes with our identity — who we are and our self-worth. When we believe that we are only worthy because of our successes and that only we can succeed, that is when we have created our own cage.
Leadership is fundamentally about directing and mobilizing more than ourselves toward a goal. You simply cannot do that well if you believe that only you can do the work.
For the VP, it showed up as control — the thousand redlines, the constant corrections, the work that was never good enough.
But the ego trap doesn’t always look like the VP’s story. Sometimes it doesn’t look like control at all. Sometimes it looks like responsibility. It looks like the person staying latest, carrying the most, never letting anything drop — not because they believe they’re the best, but because they’re afraid of what it means if they’re not there to catch it.
That was my version.
The quieter version
I thought I was done with conflating my success with my identity after becoming an executive at a publicly traded company and leading a team of over 250 people. But no.
When I returned to a smaller startup, where I doubled down on the mission and attached my identity to the organization’s success, my ego reared its head again, and all the old narratives came back.
I wasn’t micromanaging my team. I was doing something that felt more virtuous — I was filling gaps. There was work that needed doing and no one with the bandwidth or expertise to do it. So I did it.
I told myself: this is temporary. This is what leaders do in early-stage companies. This is ownership.
What I didn’t say out loud — not to my CEO, not to my board, not really to myself: we need to hire someone with expertise I don’t have. And we need to hire someone to increase our capacity.
Those were structural problems. I was trying to solve them with personal effort.
The result? I overextended myself, I lost my focus, and my self confidence, again.
I ultimately reduced my scope of work (with some persistent and kind nudging from my CEO). I won’t lie, it felt like a tremendous blow. But it was the change I needed.
The question I’ve sat with since: why did it take my CEO nudging me to reduce my scope before I named that out loud?
I think I know the answer. Saying ‘I can’t fill these gaps alone’ felt like admitting I should have seen it sooner. Should have hired better. Should have built capacity before we hit the wall. The reluctance to name the structural problem was its own ego trap — not arrogance, but the story that needing help meant I had already failed.
That is the version of this trap that I almost never see written about. And it’s the one I encounter most often in the senior leaders I coach.
The limitations you don’t see
The cage starts off small. It’s all about you.
When you let your ego’s narrative that only you can do the work, you start to overwhelm yourself. When only you are the solution, then you have to do all of the work.
It starts with later nights, some weekends. It grows into rumination in bed, a racing mind when you wake up in the middle of the night. It means distraction from your personal relationships and interactions.
But then it also starts to distract you in your work meetings. Instead of focusing on the topic at hand, you’re thinking about the projects you need to finish — the ones that only you can do. But these aren’t the worst of it.
The most negative impact shows up in how your team starts to read you.
Your constant corrections and insertions get interpreted as, “I don’t trust you.” And the truth is, you don’t.
It becomes unsafe to speak up or share a thought because you’ve proven that your default is to correct, nitpick, or simply take over the work.
People stop trying or showing proactive effort. What’s the point? It ultimately won’t matter because you’ll critique the work, commandeer it,or micromanage the task until the person wants to give up.
Your team starts to simply wait for you to initiate, to think, to drive the work. You become your own worst enemy. Instead of having your team become owners, they become deferrers — waiting for you to initiate everything.
If your version looks more like mine — overreach rather than control — the limitations are less visible but equally damaging. Your team may trust you. They may even feel protected by you. But they’re not growing, because you’re carrying what should be theirs. And you’re not growing, because you’re too busy plugging holes to lead.
And that vicious cycle reinforces your ego’s narrative, “there is no one else, only you.”
Whether you arrived there through control, overreach, or by not naming the structural constraints, the destination is the same.
You burn yourself out telling yourself that “you’re being thorough,”“keeping high standards,” or “shouldering the burden for the team .” And your team stagnates, loses their ability to grow and lead, because it’s never safe to take a risk or attempt something where they might fail.
The impact is longlasting
The immediate signs are bad, but they are overshadowed by the long-term impact.
Even worse than not developing your team is losing your best talent. The most capable people want to grow. They won’t sit still while you hold them back. They will leave. Why stay when they will never be trusted?
The most devastating part? You never discover what you are capable of as a leader because your ego is making you too attached to being a doer.
When you let your ego lead, you limit your true potential. If only you can do the work, then your hours, energy, and intellect create the limit of your power.
You cannot take on bigger roles, more scope, and greater responsibility because you haven’t developed anyone around you to take over your current tasks.
Over time, you aren’t just limiting your growth; you might even be shrinking your power by depleting yourself completely.
You are exhausted, mentally and physically, because you won’t allow yourself to rest. Or because the structure genuinely can’t support the work without you — and you haven’t yet named that as the organizational problem it actually is.
When it all sits on your shoulders, how can you rest?
None of this is comfortable to sit with. I know, because I sat with it for longer than I’d like to admit.
The path forward (not a fix — an unlearning)
If you want to aim for bigger roles, more scope ,and more impact, the shift you need doesn’t start with doing more.
It starts with doing less.
Putting down the list of to-do’s, and pausing to reflect: What do you want to become?
Do you want to be the person who delegates and spends their time on the things that only they can do?
Do you want to be a leader who develops people into their potential?
Do you want to be the person whom people trust and know that you trust them?
Are you willing to be the person who doesn’t get the credit because your greatest work is invisible — it’s in the culture you build, the leaders you develop?
If you want the above, your path forward isn’t filled with more. It’s actually about being willing to be OK with less:
Not being the hero at every turn.
Not knowing every detail of every project.
Not controlling every outcome.
Being willing to name the structural gaps you’ve been filling with personal effort — and asking for what the work actually requires.
Being needed less and no longer the go-to person.
The way to shift your mindset and your behaviors isn’t by adding more. It’s about taking things off your plate to make space for reflection and unlearning.
The step too many leaders miss
If you choose this path, be aware that it will take time to resist old habits and recurring narratives. These are long-held beliefs that served you well.
To let go of all of these stories, you have to be willing to grieve and go through all the stages of grief: denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and finally acceptance.
These are not small feelings, and they do not pass without causing some waves in their wake.
Denial is the resistance to reality that feels like a way to contain the situation, but really is just a way to delay the inevitable. Reality is like gravity. You can fight it, but you already know who will win.
When I was struggling to lead all the functions I had chosen to take on, I kept pushing back on my CEO. My ego blocked my ability to see what was evident to everyone else. Denial is your ego’s first tactic. It masks what it doesn’t want you to see and justifies what it wants you to do.
Only when I broke down one evening after yet another fight with my husband about my working hours and level of stress did I start to acknowledge the truth. I was in way over my head.
And that’s when my ego moved into anger.
Anger can brew loudly, with explosiveness, or softly, with venom. In both cases, it will drain you and leave you feeling empty and without any energy left for critical thinking or resolve.
For me, anger showed up with a victim mentality. Instead of owning my part in not addressing the structural gap and instead, adopting an unhealthy hero’s mindset, I chose to defend my choices and blame everyone and everything around me.
Only when I started to take responsibility did I shift into depression, or what I’d like to call despair.
Depression showed up for me in the form of moping and retreat. My realization and role rescoping announcement came while I was on vacation at a family reunion. Instead of taking part and enjoying the festivities, I was busy nursing my wounds and feeling sorry for myself. I felt shame, guilt, and a continued sense of being wronged. I’d like to say I moved out of this phase with clarity and a renewed sense of purpose, but I didn’t. If I’m honest, it took me weeks, if not months, to truly move through the depression phase.
Bargaining showed up late for me — after I thought I was through it all. I assumed that once I’d settled into the reduced scope, my ego had made peace with reality. But no, I found myself looking for ways to insert myself into other parts of the business. My ego wasn’t done. It was just regrouping.
Bargaining is one last Hail Mary from your ego, trying once more to push against reality and what you actually need. The negotiation is just a way to delay the final step.
I only stopped negotiating when my body flat-out refused to do more. I was so exhausted and frayed. I needed rest, deep rest.
Acceptance is when you can finally move forward. It might not feel relaxed, but most people feel some release from the tension when you reach this state. You’re no longer fighting against gravity, you’re starting to work with it.
When I finally reached the stage of acceptance, I felt like a deflated balloon. I was finally ready to take on less to focus on my health, my family, and to work my way back towards more sustainable and strategic leadership.
What I didn’t realize when I was going through it was that you might have to go through this cycle over and over again. Different situations, different people will trigger different narratives, requiring you to recommit to this path and to grieve again and again.
I was 15 years into my leadership career when I was reminded: Your ego will not let go of its attachment to your success narratives without a fight. And that it will try to regain its control whenever it sees a chance.
Choose your path
If you’re feeling the burden of “only I can do the work” or have someone on your team who is struggling through it, the good news is that you (or they) can overcome these default tendencies.
It will not happen overnight, and it will require time and persistence. And the more practice you invest, the easier it will get. The cycles, when they return (notice I said “when” and not “if”), will get shorter and less stressful.
The key is to start with a strategic pause to reflect and ask yourself, “What do you want to become?”
The ego that got you here wants you to think letting go means failure. It doesn’t. It means evolution.
What I found on the other side wasn’t ease. It was clarity — and the first real sense in years that I was leading instead of just surviving.
YOUR TURN
I’d love to know which old habits no longer serve you and what you did to break free. Share them in the comments below. I read each one, and I know others will benefit, too.
And if this post resonated with you, please consider sharing it with another leader who needs a reminder that their challenges are not unique and that they can get to the other side. I’ll be cheering them on.
May you lead without limits,
P.S. My First Retreat — A Career without Limits
I’ve been planning something special for the fall. Many of you have reached out asking for more help in shaping your career. You might already be looking for your next adventure at your current company or another, or perhaps you haven’t yet started but would like to take a strategic pause with support.
If this is you, come and join me for my first-ever (and maybe my only) retreat on November 12-15 in Lancaster, PA. It will be a relaxing long weekend of fun, reflection, and nourishment. Spaces are limited, and as a subscriber, I’m letting you know first. Learn more here.