What My Annoyance Knew Before I Did

"I think I messed up the formula in cell F14. Can you fix it for me, please?" For three months, that email kept coming. Every time, I fixed it. It only took two minutes, and if I'm honest, it felt good. In this episode, I tell you about my client Courtney and the spreadsheet I built to help her track her projections against her actuals. Several times a month she'd break a formula, and several times a month I'd rescue her. Then one morning, three emails landed before 10:00 am, and I felt a small flicker of annoyance. That flicker knew something I hadn't let myself see yet. This episode names the pattern clearly: overfunctioning, Harriet Lerner's term for the person who moves in fast to advise, rescue, and fix. It looks like competence and feels like care. Underneath, it's a response to anxiety, and it has a partner. Every time one person does more, the other does a little less, and each move makes the next one more likely. I was training Courtney to need me, and I didn't see it. I also talk about why this dance is so much harder to leave when you're a woman. The research shows women get no credit for helping at work and get penalized for declining. Men get credit for helping and no penalty for saying no. Then I bring in Edwin Friedman's differentiated leader and talk about how this approach to leadership is the antidote to over functioning. **In this episode:** - The spreadsheet emails, and the sentence from Courtney I almost took as a compliment - What overfunctioning is, and why every fix makes the next request more likely - The research on why stepping back costs women more than men - The differentiated leader, and what it means to stay steady when your team's anxiety pulls at you - What I do now when I feel the pull to fix, and the pushback to expect when I stop **This week's permission:** You are allowed to let someone carry what's theirs. You are allowed to feel the pull to fix it and stay where you are. You are allowed to care deeply about your people and still hand the problem back. To join the waitlist for the micro-training The First Boundary (The One That Changes Everything), click here.