Are You Comfortable With Power?

A pattern I see in high-performing leaders:

They are very comfortable with responsibility.

But very uncomfortable with power.

So they compensate by overworking instead of making hard decisions.

They take on more.

They work longer hours.

They step in when things go wrong.

They become the stabilizer for everyone else.

This works for a while.

Sometimes for years.

But eventually the organization becomes dependent on them.

Decision-making bottlenecks form.

The leadership team stops taking full ownership.

And the leader becomes exhausted — not because they can’t handle the work, but because they are carrying the system emotionally and operationally.

In family systems language, this is called overfunctioning.

And overfunctioning always creates underfunctioning somewhere else in the system.

Many burnout problems at the top are not time management problems.

They are system design problems.