What If You Let Them Take the Wheel?

And, and I think it's because this pattern of behavior that I'm calling taking the wheel is really, like hardwired into those of us who are high performers, highly competent people.

I think highly competent people are rewarded early on in our lives for being able to get things done.

And being able to get things done eventually grows into being able to solve problems, right? To do more complicated things, you have to solve problems, see around corners, figure out solutions to things that aren't obvious at first.

And that's kind of like a rush.

It's really fun to do that.

And because we're good at it and we get thanked for it and rewarded for it, it's, it's like, for me, it feels like it starts spilling over and it's like, well, I'll solve other people's problems too.

I'll be so helpful.

And that really is the pattern that I want to poke around in a little bit today, because eventually, we are, sometimes without even knowing it, trying to take the wheel for everyone else in ways that become less helpful, right? For a long time, I just thought of this as like a service that I was providing, right? Sort of servant leadership.

I thought this is what it looked like to be a good leader.

You know that old story, like virtually all of us were told, I think we were.

If you grew up in the era I did, I'm Gen X, hardcore Gen X. I don't even get to like border millennials, but that generation of leaders were raised on servant leadership.

And the classic story was like, you know, if the CEO wouldn't stop to pick up a piece of trash on the hallway, you know, it was like leaving that for the janitor.

That was abhorrent.

You wanted every senior leader willing to do the job of anyone underneath them.

And it has-- there's a place for it.

It has merit to say like, "Look, you gotta be willing to roll up your sleeves and do some stuff." But I think it can get, uh, twisted a little bit and give us a license to do work that really is not ours to do, right? To make decisions that are not ours to make.

And that actually can take the knees out from under people that we are really trying to develop and grow.

So I think that's what I wanna dig into in this episode is like, because we are the person who got here, got to where we are by being someone who figures stuff out, who sees a problem and maps out a solution and executes it, sometimes before anyone has even finished asking the question, that can go too far.

And when it goes too far, it can have some costs to, largely to the people around us, and in some cases back to ourselves.

Like when you bring that same wiring into your personal life, right? When you take that, that like almost over-capable nature into your personal life, like you see someone struggling and your whole system activates because you already know the answer.