Your Over Functioning is a Problem

You all know the scene. As the leader, it's time to interrupt someone on the team and ask them for an outcome that may create pressure, or at least discomfort. There is a widely used, universally accepted way to do this. Drop the news. Lay out the case. Ask what they need from you to get it done. The supposed payoff: you get to feel like a highly reasonable, highly likeable leader.

I remember the first time I didn't dust that approach off. I realized, standing there, that the last part, asking what they need from me, wasn't there to make me feel good. It was there to make me feel less bad. And had nothing to do with them at all. Truthfully, I didn't have room for my task list to grow. Truthfully, what I was asking for was their job anyway. And the net effect of the question, once I heard it plainly, was this: how can you get this thing done that belongs to you, and then how can you involve me in it somehow?

Not only did I not need to be involved. I shouldn't have been.

So I didn't ask.

And nothing bad happened.

That was the first in a long string of instances where I simply didn't ask the question and nothing bad happened. Hindsight has shown me how many bad things had been happening because I did ask that question so many times in the past.

I now run over functioning analysis with teams and leaders regularly because the hidden costs are too large to ignore.

So let's talk about it.

Here's a new test for whether leadership is happening, or something less: After you meet with your people, whose task list tends to grow? If yours has to grow every time someone else's does, then you're not leading. You're tasking. And you're not here to task.

Leading is multiplicative: you support the frame that allows many people to do more of what matters and less of what doesn't. You may be tempted to think taking a task is addition (you add a task to your list) in place of multiplication, which would be bad enough. But it's worse. What you've done is subtractive. When you involve yourself in someone else's loop, you create an additional point of failure, and that point of failure is you. And since you're likely already overloaded, you're a point of failure that is likely to fail. If you're in a game of multiplication, you will lose by playing addition.

Why does it feel so reasonable in the moment? Because you are the easiest answer to any problem. The payoff isn't the result. It's that you don't have to argue or negotiate with yourself. You just make yourself do it. And the team learns the rule: you will soak up whatever isn't covered.

You're the blank cheque. They get to fill in whatever they decide they can't pay, and all they have to do is look unable to pay it. Under functioning becomes a request you cannot decline. They never have to ask, which is exactly why it's invisible.

Sound familiar? It gets worse.

However you show up in your business trains your team to need you to show up that way. It's a vicious cycle, in that it can be impossible to tell where it begins. Did it begin because you inserted yourself? Or did it begin because someone else refused to insert themselves? It's likely too close to call. It also doesn't much matter, because the result is the same either way. The point of your over function is the point at which others learn they don't have to function adequately. It's how you get invisibly and unconsciously controlled by others.

This means you set the cap on their performance. And the cap isn't your expectations. It's where you stop expecting and do it yourself.

Two things follow. Whatever you take up can't be released later without looking like a failure that is now yours. And you can no longer trust your own read on what anyone is capable of, because you are now the confounding variable. What might they be capable of if you weren't inserting yourself?

If I had a mic I'd drop it. As long as it wasn't mine.

The cost for your over functioning isn't paid in visible failure. It's paid in altitude never gained. Which means over functioning doesn't fail outright. The cost is the result you didn't get, the agency you didn't build, the time you could have used for higher order operations if it wasn't spoken for in tasking instead of leading. All adding up to the opportunity that quietly never showed. Invisible, because nothing broke.

There's a cost on the other side of the desk too, and this is the part that sounds harsh but isn't. When you don't hold someone accountable, you've made a decision about their capability on their behalf. Maybe because the conversation is hard. Maybe because you like them. Maybe because it's easier to let it go this time. None of those reasons are about them. All of them are about you and your comfort level. It looks like kindness, or it looks like them being "unable to get the job done" and "unable to hear how you really think and feel about it". Either way, it's a conclusion you make rather than giving them the real chance to be something more.

What's usually underneath is holding others as fragile and helpless. Often because you're afraid of something in yourself: losing them, not being worth them, not being able to make it without them, not being a good guy or gal. So you parent. You run a force field ahead of and around them, adjusted for goals and responsive to your assumptions about their incapacity, and they don't know about it. This isn't a kind of help that actually helps. This is something that looks helpful and serves a short-term desire for relief or avoidance at the cost of long-term prospects.

At the very least, over functioning prevents others from developing a capacity. At worst you become a failure point for everyone else's accountability. So, does your help connect them with your power, or theirs? Is your help multiplicative, or subtractive?

Every act of over functioning is a silent, unilateral substitution for a conversation that never happened. So the alternative is the conversation. The point where you'd normally step in is the place where a boundary, a specification and an expectation belong. Boundary work is the 22% pushback that prevents resentment from over accommodation on your side and a lack of respect on theirs. No performance relationship should feel 100% comfortable. Chasing challenging outcomes together means there will be pressure, and that pressure should show up in constructive but real ways.

Here's how to know if you do boundary work: if you can't think of a specific instance in the past five days where you consciously enacted a pressure transfer to the person where it rightly belongs, then you don't do boundary work.

In practice it's a handful of sentences. "The accountability for that result sits with you. What could you do to get it done?" And if they ask you the old question themselves: "If you had to get it done without involving me in the loop, how would you do it?" Even your good ideas can stay with them. "I think it would make a difference if I made this phone call, but I can't. What could you do to make it more likely to happen without involving me as a resource? How could you make the phone call or its equivalent?"

You're still putting the idea out there. You're just not taking ownership of it.

Anything less communicates loud and clear that you don't see them as a force.

Treat them like a force and you set the stage for them to be one.

Treat them like a dependent, and they will honour the role you put them in.

If your task list has to grow, loop them in so it's not permanent. "I'll do it three times with you and then it's yours." That's the only caveat. Then watch the ratio between the work you absorb and the work you transfer. The definition of leadership is that the ratio migrates over time, and it migrates in the direction of the team doing more.

Accountability means to hold them as able. The clue is in the word: in my account, you are able. Accountability where you hold them as able is the highest form of ongoing positive regard.

Here's the whole argument in bullet points:

• The point at which you over function is the point at which you limit others. You set the cap on their performance, and the cap isn't your expectations. It's where you step in.
• However you show up in your business trains your team to need you to show up that way.
• After you meet with your people, whose task list grows? If it's yours, you're tasking, not leading.
• Asking your team how they can involve you in their loop creates an additional point of failure. You're already overloaded, so it's a point of failure likely to fail. That isn't additive. It's subtractive.
• The point where you'd normally step in is where a boundary, a specification and an expectation belong.
• If you can't name a pressure transfer you consciously made in the past five days, you don't do boundary work.

Stop asking people to involve you in their loop. I can't remember who I borrowed this statement from: Set an alarm for a random time tomorrow afternoon (like 2:17 pm) and ask yourself: whose job am I doing? Then go and give that job back.

— C

Running this kind of analysis is harder alone. I work with groups of 7–12 CEOs, Founders and Owners who do it together. See my contact info if you're interested.