When my oldest was a newborn, I was the one who knew everything.
I knew what each cry meant, which positions worked, which routines helped, and which interventions did not. I had figured it out through exhaustion, trial and error, and the particular attentiveness that comes from being the person who is always there.
The problem was that knowing everything made it very hard to let anyone else help.
Not because the help was not available. Usually by the time someone else offered, I had already done it. Or I could do it faster than explaining it. Or I had figured out the right way, which was really just the way I had figured out, and anyone else's version looked inefficient by comparison.
So I kept doing everything. Everyone around me kept not learning how to do it. And I kept being the person who knew everything, did everything, and could not understand why I was so tired.
That is not really a parenting story. It is a leadership story.
When Competence Stops Scaling
I have watched versions of this play out in boardrooms, executive teams, and founder-led companies for years.
The person at the center is usually genuinely excellent. They know the business. They see problems quickly. They care about the quality of the work. They have often built their career by being the person who could figure it out and get it done.
That competence is real. It is also often exactly what got them promoted.
But eventually the job changes.
At some point, leadership is no longer mostly about producing the answer yourself. It becomes much more about building the judgment, capability, and systems that allow good answers to exist without you being personally responsible for every one of them.
That is where a real strength can quietly start working against you.
If you were rewarded for being indispensable, it is very easy for indispensability to keep feeling like evidence that you are leading well. You are still contributing. The work is still getting done. People still come to you because they trust you to solve things.
For a while, that can feel like success.
The problem is that being needed and being effective are not always the same thing.
How the Bottleneck Gets Built
This is the Near Enemies pattern I now think of as Leadership → Indispensability.
It is seductive because it does not look like dysfunction. It looks like dedication. It looks like high standards. It looks like caring more than everyone else about getting it right.
And for a while, it can work beautifully.
The work gets done. The results are real. The leader can point to everything they are carrying as evidence of contribution.
Until the organization stops scaling because too much still has to pass through one person.
The leader who knows everything becomes the bottleneck. The executive who can do it better than everyone else becomes the reason no one else learns to do it. The founder whose judgment built the company becomes the limit on how much judgment the company can develop anywhere else.
The strength did not disappear. It just kept doing the job it had always done after the job itself had changed.
That is the part I find interesting.
The Hard Part Is Letting Someone Else Learn
Back in the newborn years, the shift was painfully ordinary: letting someone else do it their way.
Not my way. A perfectly workable way.
That was harder than wanting help. I absolutely wanted help. What I had trouble tolerating was the learning curve that came with actually allowing someone else to get good at it.
My efficiency had become the standard. Any deviation from it felt like lowering the bar rather than building capacity.
Leaders do this all the time.
We say we want people to take ownership, then intervene before they can. We say we want stronger teams, then measure quality against the exact way we would have done the work. We say we want to scale, while continuing to derive some part of our identity from being the person everyone still needs.
The answer is not to become less capable. It is to stop using your own capability as the measure of whether the system is working.
That is a much harder shift than it sounds.
Because if being the person who can always solve the problem helped build your career, then stepping back can feel a lot like becoming less useful.
But leadership eventually asks something different.
It asks whether the people around you are getting better. Whether judgment is spreading. Whether decisions can happen without you. Whether the system is stronger because you are in it, not simply more dependent on you.
That is the distinction I keep coming back to.
The question is not whether you are excellent at what you do.
It is whether your excellence is building capability around you, or quietly making you more indispensable.
What are you still personally excellent at that the people around you need the room to learn?