A client said to me a few months ago, “I’ve got to get my team to own more of this, because right now I’m the go‑to for 200 people.” She said it with this quiet exhale, and you could tell she’d been carrying that weight for a long time.
When I asked her recently if she’d met that goal, she said, “One hundred percent. I have way fewer Slacks, fewer emails, and a lot less swirl before I’m out of the office. I feel like I can breathe.” The way she said it felt grounded and real, that kind of ease that usually takes a lot of letting go to get to.
What changed between those two conversations? That’s what we’re unpacking today – how she stopped treating other teams’ urgency as her personal emergency and started letting her team rise up to own it.
Let’s talk about what it costs to be the one everybody always counts on. In a lot of companies, especially when things are changing fast, accountability gets fuzzy and functions start working in silos. And that’s when operations leaders end up carrying the load of keeping everyone moving.
When cross-functional collaboration breaks down, the people with enough pull to get things moving usually end up right in the middle of every fire drill.
When one person becomes the default fixer, everyone else tends to stand still
A lot of ops leaders end up being default fixer in the room. It can be a lot of fun, but it can also get expensive fast. You end up solving problems that should have been handled before they ever reached you.
My client was in that exact spot. She was known as the fixer—the person you called when something was stuck. Her turning point didn’t come from a shiny new framework or some delegation training. It came when she started asking herself:
“Who actually owns this?”
And then practiced staying out of their lane. She started to get that being compassionate didn’t have to mean rescuing, and that she could care just as much without carrying everybody else’s side of the work.
And as she did that, the space between “someone asks me” and “I respond” got a little longer. There were fewer “just checking in” messages, fewer weekend pings, fewer last‑minute asks she felt responsible for fixing. And with that breathing room, she started saying yes to bigger opportunities—international projects, presentations, chances to represent her team and have a much broader impact.
Boundaries are how you set your team up for success
One thing that helped her was realizing boundaries aren’t a withdrawal. They’re one way to set people up for success (when done well). She started learning how to honor her own sense of empathywithoutjumpingin every time someone felt pressure. It wasn’t cold or cruel; it’s just more grounded. It meant she could preserve her focus for the decisions only she could make and the relationships only she could shape.
Here’s one question to sit with this week: What would your team start to own if you stopped treating other teams’ urgency as your responsibility and let them take the first shot at solving it?
Maybe this week, notice which messages you always reach for first, and before you respond, ask yourself, “Whose job is this, really?”
If you’re nodding along with all this, you might like Episode 117, “Should Ops Execs Stop Trying to Fix Everything?” It’s a great follow-up to this one, all about staying human instead of the hero, and you can find it at YourFutureRealized.com/117.
You can’t stop the chaos, but you can change how you move through it—so why not try?