The problem with being the only one who can do it is that you stay the only one who can do it.

When my oldest son started driving, I got 13 hours back in my week. That is how much time went into shuttling him alone to soccer, football, and whatever else, and I never counted it until the keys changed hands.

For a year and a half, my daughter refused to drive the interstate that runs through our city because it scared her.  Then dance put her on the other side of it, she drove it, and she survived. Keeping her off that highway was never keeping her safe; it was keeping her small.

I grew up on a farm where the answer to everything was to do the work, and I carried that wiring into my consulting career, where I was the guy who handled it. The morning after our daughter was born, I went out to visit clients. I never questioned it, because doing was the only way I knew how to matter.

The question that could have filled the thought bubble above my head:  if someone else can do it, what am I still for?

In The Things We Hide, I write about the Circle of Ownership: the move from a fragmented self, where insecurity decides how we show up, to a whole one, where we own how others experience us. A circle is open or closed, and mine was closed: reality was the mirror, never the window everyone else was looking through.

My intent was service. I answered questions people could have answered themselves, fixed problems that were not mine to fix, and would have sworn I was helping. 

But people did not experience help; they experienced and perceived a leader who did not trust them with their own jobs, and a closed circle keeps that truth outside.

Owning the circle starts with admitting you are wrong, not as a defeat, but as an acceptance that someone’s experience did not match your intent. It meant asking why capable people rode in the passenger seat of their own jobs, and being willing to hear that the answer was me.

Being the fixer or doer feels like production, but it robs people the same way never handing over the keys robs a teenager: quietly, with love as the cover story.

Podcast

Laurie Maddalena was handed her first direct report a year out of college, with no training and no definition of what leading even meant, and by 33 she was a credit union executive watching a brilliant CEO give his leadership team the silent treatment for three days. She is now the founder of Envision Excellence, a Certified Speaking Professional, and the author of The Elevated Leader, and has spent more than twenty years teaching high-achieving managers to escape the fixer trap.

Here are three takeaways from my conversation with Laurie.

1. You Were Trained to Fix. You Were Hired to Facilitate.

A year into her first job, Laurie’s manager announced that someone new would be reporting to her, and three weeks later Pat arrived. Nobody sat her down to explain what leadership required, so she led the way that the era taught: “I thought my job was to tell her what to do, give her direction, and answer her questions.” 

That version of managing worked when companies ran on tenure, loyalty, and sacrifice, but today’s workplace holds five generations and people who expect growth, connection, and a life. The leaders who thrive have moved from fixer to facilitator: coaching conversations, honest feedback, intentional career paths, and connection engineered on purpose. None of it happens by accident, which is why Laurie draws the line cleanly: “Leadership is action. It’s not reacting.” Fixing gets today’s task done, while facilitating builds the person who does tomorrow’s without you.

2. Silence in the Room Is Not Agreement

Laurie once worked for a CEO who was brilliant, strategic, and insistent on disagreement, right up until a colleague gave him some. He got up, left the meeting, and gave the executive team the silent treatment for three days. Nobody announced the new rules; everyone just learned them, checking the temperature each morning before deciding how honest to be.

Laurie calls what grows in that soil back channeling, and it produces “the meeting after the meeting, when everyone just says what they think the boss wants to hear and then you leave, and you talk about how you don’t really agree.” Psychological safety is not a poster; it is a leader actively asking who disagrees and thanking the one who says so. And she is blunt about where the duty sits: “I don’t believe it’s an employee’s job to manage a toxic leader.” If a manager is toxic, their leader should be handling it.

3. Manage Your Focus, Not Your Time

Of the six leadership saboteurs Laurie names in The Elevated Leader, she admits that a lack of delegation is still her biggest, so she engineers her way around it. She keeps a running list in her planner of what she is doing today that she should not be, and has told her team to claim her work outright. She blocks productivity sprints for the key result areas she is actually paid for, and three times a year she leaves for a three-night retreat to think about her business instead of running it.

Underneath every practice is one reframe: “I don’t think it’s about managing our time. It’s about managing our focus, our attention, and our energy.” Reflection, she argues, is the most undervalued skill in leadership, because “you can’t be strategic if you don’t have time to think about it.” Your best ideas are not waiting for you in the trenches.

Hand Over the Keys

This whole conversation kept circling one question: what are you still holding that someone else is ready to carry?

That question is the reason The Things We Hide exists. The book is about owning the whole circle: your intentions, your actions, and how people actually experience you, because closing that gap is where the fixer trap starts to open. If the book has done that work in you, take two minutes and leave an Amazon review so the next leader can find it, and if you have not read it yet, consider this the nudge to stop doing work that was never yours to hold.

Grab your copy or leave a review: Amazon.com

Did you catch this podcast? If not, listen to it here.