The Dangerous Addiction to Being Needed

Why some leaders create dependence rather than developing people who can succeed without them

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Atlanta, GA

There is a particular smile executives wear when someone says, “We can’t move forward until you weigh in.” It is not the smile of a burdened person. It is the smile of a person who has just been told they are still, in fact, necessary. I have worn that smile. I have worn it in meetings where my actual contribution was nodding at the right cadence and repeating the last thing someone smarter had said, slightly louder, in my own voice. The nodding was mistaken for wisdom. I did not correct the record. George Costanza would have been envious.

This is the confession part. Get comfortable with it, because the knife comes later.

For a stretch of my career, I ran what I now recognize as a small dependency operation disguised as a team. Nothing was written down anywhere. It never is. It showed up in habits. I answered questions that direct reports were fully capable of answering themselves, because answering them made me feel like the answer. I sat in on calls I did not need to attend, because my presence signaled importance, and importance felt like oxygen. I told myself I was being a hands-on leader. What I was actually doing was building a business that could not survive a two-week vacation, let alone my absence, because I had quietly made sure of it.

Here is the part nobody wants to say in a leadership podcast: being needed feels better than being unnecessary. It feels better in the specific, chemical way that a compliment feels better than silence. Somebody messages you at 9pm because a client is upset, and for one warm second, you matter more than anyone else in the company. That feeling is legal, it is free, and it is roughly as good for your organization as a second dessert is for your cholesterol.

Meet the Guru

Every corporate hallway has a version of the character I will call Gary, because Gary has done nothing to deserve better anonymity. Gary is the department’s institutional memory, the keeper of the one spreadsheet nobody else understands, the man who says “just loop me in” so often it has become his personality. Gary is not evil. Gary genuinely believes he is protecting the team from chaos. What Gary is actually protecting is his own relevance, because Gary has done the math, consciously or not, and concluded that an indispensable Gary outlives a redundant one during every layoff cycle in recorded history.

The tragedy of Gary is that he is often talented enough to build real leverage. He could train three people to do what only he can do and then go be brilliant at something new. Instead, he trains no one, hoards the one skill that makes him irreplaceable, and calls it commitment. Give Gary a promotion and watch him find a new bottleneck to guard within the month. The addiction does not stay in one department. It follows the person.

The Slow Poisoning of a Bench

Succession planning decks love the phrase “developing future leaders.” The decks are earnest. The decks are also, in a shocking number of organizations, theater performed twice a year for a board that wants reassurance more than truth. Real development requires a leader to hand away a piece of their own value and trust that the organization gets stronger for it. Dependence requires the opposite. It requires the leader to keep just enough friction in every process that nothing important can happen without a phone call to them personally.

You can spot a dependence culture by what breaks when the leader takes a real vacation, the kind with no laptop and no international roaming. In a healthy team, very little breaks. Decisions get made a notch below expectations, someone learns something, life continues. In a dependence culture, the whole operation idles like a car at a red light that never turns green, waiting for a text that says, “sorry, just saw this, approved.” The leader returns to a hero’s welcome and a stack of relieved messages, and somewhere in their chest a small, shameful part of them enjoys the wreckage, because the wreckage is proof of their own importance.

Claire’s Excellent Trap

Claire runs a mid-sized team and is, by every account, a wonderful mentor. She takes people to coffee. She gives thoughtful feedback. She also cannot resist rewriting every deck her team produces the night before a big meeting, “just to tighten it up.” Her team has learned, correctly, that final drafts do not matter, because Claire’s fingerprints will be the ones on the version that actually gets presented. So, they stop trying to make final drafts great. Why sprint the last mile if the marathon gets rerun for you at midnight. Claire believes she is raising the bar. She is actually lowering the ceiling, one polished slide at a time, and building a team that will fall apart the day she is not there to do the last lap for them.

The Uncomfortable Math

Somewhere along the way, “they need me” got promoted from an observation to a personal identity, and that promotion is where the addiction lives. A leader who is truly doing the job well should be working toward their own obsolescence in any single task, replaced constantly by someone they trained, freed up to go create the next piece of value. A leader who has confused being needed with being valuable will unconsciously sabotage that outcome every single time, because obsolescence, even earned and healthy obsolescence, feels like death to an ego that has been feeding on relevance.

I am not suggesting every leader who answers an off-hour’s message is secretly hoarding power like a corporate dragon sitting on gold. Sometimes a question genuinely needs you. The test is not whether you get asked. The test is whether you have built anything that could survive you saying no.

Brace 4 Impact

• Run the two week test. Take real time off with no laptop and track, honestly, what actually broke versus what simply happened differently. Different is not broken.
• Audit your “just loop me in” list. For each item, write down what would happen if you were not looped in for one full quarter. If the answer is “not much,” stop looping yourself in.
• Stop the midnight rewrite. Whatever version your team produces, present it as is at least once. Let the flaws be visible and let the fix be theirs, not yours at 11pm.
• Name your successor out loud, to their face. Not in a review document. In conversation. Watch how uncomfortable that makes you, and treat the discomfort as data.
• Track your indispensability like a metric, not a compliment. If the number is not shrinking over time, you are not developing people, you are collecting them.

Book Recommendation: Let It Go! by Emily Morgan

The leadership skill most of us know we need but still struggle to master

There is a reason so many talented leaders are overwhelmed. It is not always because they have too much to do. Sometimes it is because they refuse to let anyone else do it.

Delegation sounds simple in theory. Hand off the work. Empower your people. Focus on what matters most. Everybody nods enthusiastically when those words appear on a PowerPoint slide.

Then Monday morning arrives.

Suddenly, it feels easier to do it yourself.

That is where Emily Morgan’s Let It Go!: How to (Finally) Master Delegation for You and Your Organization comes in.

This is not another leadership book filled with vague advice about trusting your team and magically finding more hours in the day. Morgan tackles the real reason delegation is so difficult: it is often a mindset problem before it becomes a management problem.

Many leaders have built their careers by being the person who gets things done. They solve problems. They know the details. They step in when something goes wrong. They become indispensable.

Unfortunately, there is a fine line between being indispensable and becoming the bottleneck.

Let It Go! challenges leaders to identify where they create unnecessary dependence and how they can redirect their time toward the work where they can make their greatest contribution. The book offers a practical approach to building better delegation habits while giving teams the autonomy, tools, and clarity they need to succeed. The latest edition also explores the psychological barriers that keep leaders holding on too tightly and considers how AI can support smarter delegation.

The central lesson is particularly relevant today: leadership is not about proving that you can do everything. It is about creating an environment where more gets accomplished without everything having to go through you.

That takes trust. It takes discipline. And, perhaps most difficult of all, it requires leaders to let go of the parts of their identity tied to being the person everyone depends on.

If your calendar is packed, your team constantly waits for your decisions, and you secretly believe that doing it yourself would be faster, Let It Go! may be the book you need to read.

Because eventually, every growing leader faces the same question:

Are you leading the work, or has the work started leading you?

My Take

Let It Go! is a timely reminder that delegation is not simply about getting things off your plate. Done well, it creates capacity, develops people, and allows leaders to focus their energy where it can have the greatest impact.

Recommended for: Leaders, entrepreneurs, executives, and anyone who has ever said, “I’ll just do it myself. It’ll be quicker.”

And let’s be honest. We’ve all said it.