The Fixer's Trap: Are You the Business Bottleneck?

How to Break Free by Mastering the Art of Strategic Delegation

It’s 10 PM on a Tuesday, and you just solved the big crisis. You stayed late to rebuild the financial model or Google Sheets document because no one else could do it right. You are the hero, the indispensable fixer who keeps the company running.

It often starts with a simple thought, one I know well from my own experience: “Ugh, it will just be quicker if I do it myself.” Or the even more seductive, “No one can do this as well as I can.”

While that may be true in the moment, it’s also the first step into The Fixer’s Trap. This is the cycle where your competence becomes the company’s biggest constraint. This article will help you diagnose if you’re caught in it and show you the path to becoming a leader who truly scales.

The Allure of the Hero: Why the Fixer’s Trap is So Seductive

Let’s be honest: it feels good to be needed. When you’re the go-to person who can solve any problem, you get an undeniable sense of importance and control. You do the hard work because you care deeply about the success of the company and your team.

This feeling can be even more intense for leaders with ADHD traits. Many of us grapple with something called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD), an extreme emotional sensitivity to perceived criticism or failure. The thought of delegating a task and having it fail can feel like a direct reflection on our own competence. So, we hold on tightly. We become the hero to avoid any possibility of that perceived failure.

Furthermore, there can be an underlying fear that if we successfully delegate our core tasks, we might not be needed anymore. But the truth is, you aren’t being replaced; you’re being promoted – from a doer to a designer, a role that is infinitely more valuable.

But, ugh – is it a difficult feeling to wrangle when you are going through it.

The High Price of Your Cape: The True Cost of Not Delegating

While you’re busy saving the day, the costs are mounting. According to a 2015 Gallup study, CEOs who excel at delegation achieve 33% higher revenue than those who don’t – and that was 10 years ago! The cost of not delegating is real, tangible, and it impacts every layer of your organization.

1. It Disempowers Your Team

When you are always the answer, you inadvertently make your team feel incompetent. You communicate a lack of trust, which stifles their growth and creates a culture of dependency where everyone waits for you to solve their problems.

2. It Chains You to the Tactical Weeds

Every task you don’t delegate is time you can’t spend on the deep, strategic systems work you were hired to do. You never get to work on the business because you’re perpetually stuck putting out fires in the business, a trap highlighted in a Harvard Business Review study which found leaders who struggle with this spend up to 60% of their time on tasks others could handle.

3. It Guarantees Your Own Burnout

As I learned the hard way, there is no quicker pathway to burnout than taking on all the work yourself. The constant pressure and unsustainable workload will inevitably lead to exhaustion and resentment, making you less effective in the role you care so much about.

This is compounded if you are married and/or have children or any other responsibilities. Your tank is empty by the time you finish being the hero.

The Escape Route: The 3 Mindset Shifts for Effective Delegation

Breaking free from the Fixer’s Trap requires a fundamental identity shift. It’s about learning to provide value in a more leveraged and scalable way by mastering strategic delegation.

Shift 1: From “Doing” to “Designing”

Your value is no longer measured by your personal output, but by the performance of the systems you create. Your first act of delegation is often to delegate a recurring task to a documented process or a simple checklist that empowers someone else to achieve 80% of what you could do. Perfection is the enemy of effective delegation.

Shift 2: From “Solving” to “Coaching”

This is about delegating outcomes, not just tasks. It is worth the time investment to sit down with your team members, walk them through the process, and then truly step out of the way. Your role is to answer their questions with better questions, coaching them to find the solution themselves and build their own problem-solving muscle.

Shift 3: From “Controlling” to “Creating Clarity”

It is hard to let go. It will take longer for your team to get it right the first time, and there will be mistakes along the way. You must embrace this. These momentary stumbles are a necessary investment in future speed and scale. Your job is to provide crystal clear direction on the goal (the “what” and “why”), and then trust your team to own the “how.”

Consider This Post: Especially if you struggle with Role Clarity and want to improve your relationship with your CEO and team.
The Visionary and Integrator: 3 Conversations to Define Your Partnership

Take the First Step: Diagnose Your Own Mindset

Recognizing the trap is the first step to escaping it. Before you can change your actions, you have to get honest about your current mindset.

I’ve created a simple, 2-minute quiz to help you do just that. It’s designed to give you a clear picture of whether you are operating primarily as a reactive “Fixer” or a proactive “Designer.”

The Operational Leader’s Mindset Audit

My promise to you: We will deliver you the results of this assessment without secretly signing you up for anything you didn’t want. No Spam. No sharing your information, just the results, and one follow-up.

Conclusion: Let Go of the Cape

The allure of the “Fixer’s Trap” is powerful. Being the hero feels like you have your hands firmly on the wheel, steering the ship through every storm. But this feeling of control is an illusion. When you are the only one who can patch the leaks and read the maps, you aren’t truly steering—you are just keeping the vessel from sinking, moment to moment, while it drifts aimlessly.

The journey from Fixer to Designer is the true path to scalable leadership. It’s a conscious choice to trade the frantic work of patching leaks for the strategic work of building a more resilient ship. It means empowering your crew (your team) and building systems that can withstand a storm even when you’re not on deck.

Letting go of the hero’s cape is not about becoming less important; it is about becoming more vital. It’s how you finally stop being a bottleneck and become the operational leader you were hired to be: the calm, strategic Anchor that holds the ship steady, allowing it to navigate with purpose and grow with confidence.

Frequently Asked Questions About Delegation

It feels overwhelming. Start small. Pick one low-risk, recurring task that you do every week. Write down the process in a simple checklist, hand it off to a team member, and make yourself available for questions.

A great starting point is to categorize your tasks into two buckets: work that requires your unique authority and strategic oversight, and work that someone else on your team could do 80% as well as you. We often get caught in the trap of holding onto tasks simply because we do them best. Your job isn’t to be the best at everything; it’s to elevate your team. Delegate tasks that can become growth opportunities for them, freeing you up to focus on the high-level strategic work that only you can do.

Failure is part of the process. Frame it as a learning opportunity, not a catastrophe. Ask, “What part of the process was unclear?” or “What support did you need that you didn’t have?” Coach them through the mistake so they can succeed the next time.

It almost always comes down to a mindset I call the “Hero Complex” or the “Fixer’s Trap.” It’s the belief that your value comes from being the one who can solve any problem. This often stems from:

A genuine desire to protect your team from being overloaded, without realizing that you’re also protecting them from growth opportunities.
A fear that it will take longer to explain the task than to just do it yourself.
A worry that if the task fails, it will reflect poorly on you.
An underlying (and often unconscious) fear that if you delegate all your core tasks, you won’t be needed anymore.

The most effective way is to delegate the outcome, not the method. Clearly define what a successful result looks like and why it’s important to the company. Provide your team member with the necessary resources and authority, agree on a few key check-in points, and then—this is the most important part—get out of their way. Trust them to navigate the path. Your role shifts from micromanaging the “how” to coaching them through roadblocks.

The most common mistake is what I call “drive-by delegation”—casually assigning a task without providing full context or confirming understanding. Another is “take-back,” where you re-assume control at the first sign of trouble instead of coaching your team member through the challenge. Lastly, a critical error is failing to publicly give credit to the team member who owned the task, which erodes trust and discourages future ownership.

In the short term, yes. In the long term, absolutely not. The hour you spend training someone today buys you dozens of hours of free time in the future. It’s a classic “urgent vs. important” problem, and you must choose important.

Frame it as a benefit to them and the business. Say, “To free up my time to focus on the high-level strategic projects you need me for, I am training our team to handle more of the day-to-day. This will increase our overall capacity.”

Yes, a huge one. Offloading is about making your life easier. Strategic delegation is about developing your people and building scalability for the company. Great delegation involves handing off tasks that will challenge and grow your team members.

The Fixer’s Trap: Are You the Business Bottleneck?

How to Break Free by Mastering the Art of Strategic Delegation

The Allure of the Hero: Why the Fixer’s Trap is So Seductive