Are You Carrying Problems That Don’t Belong to You? How Leaders Create Their Own Stress

If you lead people, you’ve felt the moment: someone walks in, drops a problem at your feet, and suddenly it’s yours.

Not because you caused it. Not because you’re the only one capable. But because you’re the leader—and leaders are wired to solve.

Here’s the tension: the more competent you are, the more problems you attract. And if you don’t manage that dynamic with intention, your leadership role quietly turns into a high-paid help desk. You become the relief valve, the alternate brain, the emotional rescue unit. You go home carrying other people’s unfinished thinking.

After 25+ years advising service-based business owners—especially dental and medical practices and growing leadership teams—I’ve seen a consistent pattern: most leadership stress isn’t caused by the business. It’s caused by the way the leader responds to the business. The stress isn’t always “too much work.” It’s too much ownership—of things that don’t belong to you.

The core insight

Your stress level will always be directly proportional to how often you accept responsibility that should have stayed with someone else.

That’s blunt. It’s also liberating—because it means stress is not just something that “happens” to you. It’s something you can redesign.

Leaders create their own stress in one primary way: they confuse being responsible for outcomes with being responsible for every problem. Those are not the same.

CEO-level leaders hold the result. They set expectations. They create clarity. They build systems. They develop people. But they do not absorb every decision, every customer complaint, every schedule issue, every team conflict, every “what should I do next?”

When you absorb problems, you don’t just take work. You take thinking. And the moment you take someone’s thinking, you also take their growth.

The workaround economy (and why it keeps winning)

In my work, I call this dynamic the workaround economy: a culture where people learn—often unintentionally—that the fastest path is to bypass the process and escalate the problem upward.

Not because your team is lazy. Not because they’re incapable. But because in many organizations, escalation is rewarded.

They bring you something unclear… and you clarify it.

They bring you an upset patient or client… and you calm it down.

They bring you a decision… and you decide.

They bring you their overwhelm… and you carry it.

What gets rewarded gets repeated.

So if you’re seeing “hand-offs” happening constantly, it’s not just a people issue. It’s a leadership conditioning issue.

Over time, these patterns create an invisible tax:

Leaders become bottlenecks.

Teams stop building judgment.

Small issues become big ones because everything waits for you.

You stay busy—but the business stops getting stronger.

The three ways problems get transferred upward.

Most responsibility transfer happens in three predictable forms. Once you can name them, you can stop being surprised by them.

1) Passive transfers

They describe the issue vaguely and wait for you to volunteer the solution.

Example: “So… the schedule is kind of a mess today.” (Translation: Please take this.)

2) Direct transfers

They drop the whole situation in your lap with an implied expectation you’ll own it.

Example: “The patient is upset. Do you want to call them?” (Translation: This is yours now.)

3) Emotional transfers

They bring urgency, drama, or overwhelm to pressure you into taking over.

Example: “I don’t know what to do, and it’s getting worse, and everyone’s mad.” (Translation: Rescue me.)

Leaders usually respond in one of two ways:

Hero mode: “Give it to me. I’ll fix it.”

Emotional reaction: frustration, lecturing, taking control.

Both responses produce the same result: you just trained them to bring you the next one.

A simple principle that changes everything: leverage vs. labor

A useful CEO-level lens is leverage vs. labor.

Labor is you doing the work, solving the problem, putting out the fire.

Leverage is you building capability so the fire doesn’t need you.

Most leaders think they’re being helpful when they take problems. They don’t realize they’re spending labor when the business needs leverage.

And here’s the kicker: if your day is dominated by labor, you start to resent your team—because you’re doing everyone’s job. But your team starts to depend on you—because you trained them to.

That resentment/dependence loop is one of the most common “quiet killers” inside service businesses.

The most underused leadership skill: don’t absorb—redirect

One of the simplest tools I teach leaders is also one of the hardest to apply under pressure:

Ask questions instead of absorbing responsibility.

Not as a gimmick. As a leadership boundary.

Try these:

“What have you already tried?”

“What options are you considering?”

“What’s the next best step in your opinion?”

“What outcome are you aiming for?”

“What do you recommend—and why?”

These questions do two critical things immediately:

Responsibility stays with the person who brought the issue.

Their thinking rises because you didn’t take the work from them.

This isn’t about being hands-off. It’s about being appropriately hands-on. You’re still involved—you’re just involved at the right level.

What this looks like in the real world

In a dental or medical practice, the transfer patterns show up fast:

Front desk escalates upset patients because the doctor/owner has historically “handled the hard conversations.”

Billing escalates payment friction because “you’re better at explaining it.”

Clinical team escalates minor supply or scheduling conflicts because it’s faster than solving it together.

Office manager escalates team conflict because “it feels risky” to hold the line without you.

In a growing agency or professional services firm, it looks like:

Project leads escalate scope creep instead of enforcing the agreement.

Team members escalate decisions that are clearly within their role because they’re afraid to be blamed.

Managers escalate performance issues because they don’t know how to have the conversation.

Everyone escalates priority decisions because “everything is urgent.”

In every case, the problem is not the problem. The problem is where ownership lives.

And ownership lives wherever the leader consistently places it.

The boundary most leaders need to set

If you want to reduce stress and build a team that thinks, you need one boundary to become non-negotiable:

“Bring me options, not problems.”

At first, people will resist. Not because they’re bad—but because the old system worked for them. They got relief by handing it off.

This is where many leaders cave. They say, “We don’t have time for this right now,” and they take it back.

But that decision is exactly why you keep reliving the same year over and over. Same issues. Same bottlenecks. Same fatigue—just with different names.

If you want a different culture, you have to tolerate the short-term discomfort of re-training the system.

Who this is for

This applies to:

Practice owners who are tired of being the default solution for everything

Entrepreneurs who feel like their business can’t run without them

Leaders and managers inside growing organizations who are drowning in escalations

High performers who unknowingly became the “catch-all” because they’re competent

If you’re the person everyone relies on, this is your warning and your opportunity: your competence is valuable—but it’s also attracting the wrong work.

Conclusion

You don’t need more time. You need cleaner ownership.

The goal isn’t to become less helpful. The goal is to become more strategic—so your business grows capacity instead of dependence.

If you’re ready to build a team that thinks for itself, takes ownership, and stops handing you problems that should never have been yours to begin with, it’s time to change the culture.

If you want help creating that shift, let’s talk.

One conversation can bring the clarity and structure that turns constant escalation into real leadership leverage.