The Most Dangerous Leaders in Your Organisation

The leadership failures that worry me least are usually the obvious ones.

The manager who avoids difficult conversations. The new leader still finding their confidence. The supervisor who can't quite land their influence. Easy to spot. Organisations find these people fast.

The leaders I'm interested in are the ones everyone calls indispensable.

Dependable. Capable. Always flat out. They solve problems fast, deliver consistently, and seem to carry more than their share of the load. They're also usually next in line for promotion.

That's where the trouble starts.

When I first moved into leadership, I thought the promotion was proof - proof I had the answers. I probably wouldn't have said that out loud, but my behaviour said it for me. Someone brought me a problem, I solved it. Someone needed a decision, I made it. A project drifted, I stepped in. If the work wasn't quite right, I'd redo it myself, because explaining it took longer than just doing it.

I wasn't trying to control anyone. I genuinely thought I was helping. My whole career had been built on being the person who knew the answer, the one people relied on to fix the hard problem. Leadership felt like a bigger version of the same job.

It isn't. The exact behaviours that got me promoted were quietly making me worse at the job once I had it.

Then the small things started. People stopped making decisions without checking with me first. Questions that should have died within the team somehow found their way to my office. Projects slowed down whenever I took leave. Meetings went quiet unless I spoke first.

I read that as respect for a while. Eventually I understood it as something less flattering - they'd become dependent on me, and I'd trained them to be. Not on purpose. One answer at a time. Every time I jumped in early, every time I rewrote a report because I could do it faster, every time I rescued a project instead of coaching someone through it, I built the same outcome, one decision at a time.

Each of those decisions made sense on its own. Together they built something much bigger than I could see while I was making them. The team slowed down. Ideas dried up. People stopped taking ownership because they knew I'd eventually step in and fix it for them. Without meaning to, I'd built a team that looked strong while I was in the room and lost when I wasn't.

That isn't leadership. It's dependence with spin.

For a long time, I thought that was just my story. It wasn't.

I've watched the same pattern play out across organisations of every size and sector since. The leader everyone calls “our strongest” usually has a team that hesitates without them. The leader praised for “being across everything” usually becomes the approval point for everything. The leader everyone depends on usually builds a team that quietly depends on them.

A GM I worked with hadn't taken a real week of leave in four years. She'd tried a few times. Every time, the same thing happened - decisions above a certain size found their way back to her inbox by day three, then her phone by day four. The last time she came back from ten days away, a stack of decisions was sitting untouched, all waiting for a call only she felt able to make. Six months on, she took two weeks off. The inbox didn't need her - because by then, her team had stopped waiting to find out if it did.

We tend to file micromanagement under personality. Ego, control, a trust issue. Sometimes that's fair. More often, it's the predictable output of how we develop people in the first place.

Think about the message most professionals get for the first part of their career. Become the expert. Know more than the room. Solve it fast. Make fewer mistakes. Be the one people can rely on.

Promotion seems to follow competence. That's the logic. Then one day the same person gets promoted into leadership, and we quietly change the definition of success without telling them.

Yesterday, success was solving the problem yourself. Today, it's building someone who can solve it without you. That's not a tweak. It's a full change of professional identity, and in most organisations the only thing that visibly changes is the title on the email signature. Everything else - years of habit - stays exactly where it was.

This is why most leadership development disappoints me. It teaches delegation, coaching, feedback, communication - all genuinely useful skills, all of them fighting against an identity that's been reinforced for many years. If my whole career has been built on having the answer, why would I stop giving it? If my reputation is built on fixing things, why would I feel comfortable watching someone else struggle through the fix? That's not a skills gap. It's an identity problem wearing a skills gap as a disguise.

I've sat with executive teams frustrated that their managers won't let go. I've listened to employees describe leaders who need to sign off on everything. I've watched organisations redesign structures, rewrite role descriptions, and pour money into leadership programs, then wonder why almost nothing changes.

Usually they're solving the wrong problem. It isn't delegation. It's identity. If your organisation has spent years rewarding people for being indispensable, don't be surprised when they keep behaving that way after the promotion. They're repeating exactly what got them the job. You trained them to do it.

The cost doesn't stay contained to the team, either. Eventually the indispensable leader burns out. Calendar full, inbox worse, every meaningful decision landing on their desk. Leave becomes something to dread because everything slows without them.

They work longer, carry more, and become the exact bottleneck they never meant to be. Eventually they cry, “why does everyone keep bringing everything to me?” They've usually already answered their own question. Because they always have.

The strongest leadership teams I've worked with aren't full of the smartest people in the room. They're full of people who redefined what success looks like for themselves. They stopped counting their value in problems solved and started counting it in capability built around them.

Their teams make the calls. Projects keep moving while they're on leave. People push back on them, disagree with them, occasionally outgrow them. They've moved from producing outcomes to producing people who produce outcomes.

Every organisation says it wants empowered leaders. Very few notice they're rewarding the exact behaviour that builds dependence.

The most dangerous leaders in your organisation are rarely the weak ones. They're usually your strongest technical performers, promoted without ever being asked to redefine what success means.

Dependence doesn't always show up in an engagement survey or a leadership competency framework. But it always shows up in slow decisions, exhausted managers, succession plans that never quite happen, capable people who've stopped thinking for themselves, and organisations that can't scale because too much knowledge and too many decisions sit with too few people.

Leadership was never about becoming indispensable. It's about building something that isn't.