One of the most persistent traps I’ve seen technology leaders fall into is quietly absorbing the work of someone who reports to them. It starts small: you review a design document and end up rewriting it, or you step into a client conversation because you don’t trust the outcome otherwise. Before long, you’re doing meaningful portions of someone else’s job while still carrying the full weight of your own. The justification is always reasonable in the moment: it’s faster, the stakes are too high, the person just needs a little more time. But if you find yourself consistently doing a subordinate’s job, the honest conclusion is that you need someone else in the role.
I want to be precise about what I mean here, because there’s an important distinction between teaching and doing. Every leader should expect to invest time in developing their people. You’ll pair with them on hard problems, walk them through your reasoning, review their work and offer feedback. That’s mentorship, and it’s one of the most valuable things you can do. What I’m describing is different: it’s when you’ve moved past coaching and are actually producing the work product yourself, or when you’re making every meaningful decision and your direct report is essentially executing your instructions rather than exercising their own judgment. When you’re the one doing the thinking, you’re doing the job.
The Cost Is Higher Than You Think
The most obvious cost is to you. Your time and attention are finite, and every hour spent doing someone else’s work is an hour not spent on the problems that only you can solve. But the less obvious costs are the ones that compound. Your other direct reports notice, they always do, and it breeds resentment or, worse, learned helplessness as they realize that struggling visibly enough will result in you stepping in. The person whose work you’re absorbing stops growing because they never have to confront the full consequences of their gaps. And the organization develops a subtle dependency on you that makes everything more fragile.
I’ve seen this pattern play out dozens of times across different organizations, and the hidden cost that leaders most consistently underestimate is the opportunity cost to the team’s maturity. A team that has a leader perpetually stepping down a level never develops the muscle to operate independently. You might be solving today’s problem, but you’re creating tomorrow’s organizational weakness. The compounding nature of this dynamic is what makes it so dangerous: each intervention feels minor, but over months they add up to a team that cannot function without you in the details.
Why We Let It Continue
If the right answer is so clear, why do smart leaders let this persist? In my experience, the reasons are rarely about the subordinate and almost always about the leader. A few patterns I’ve observed repeatedly:
- Identity attachment to the work. Many CTOs and engineering leaders rose through the ranks because they were exceptional individual contributors. Doing the technical work or making the architectural decisions still feels like “real work” in a way that managing and developing people sometimes doesn’t. Stepping in feels productive, even when it’s counterproductive.
- Conflict avoidance. Acknowledging that someone isn’t performing in their role means having a difficult conversation, and potentially making a personnel change. It’s almost always easier in the short term to just do the work yourself than to confront the reality that you’ve got the wrong person in the seat.
- Misplaced loyalty. The person might be someone you hired, someone you like personally, or someone who has been with the company a long time. Loyalty is a virtue, but not when it comes at the expense of the team, the organization, and frankly the person themselves, who deserves to be in a role where they can actually succeed.
- Optimism bias. “They just need another quarter.” “Once we get past this project, I’ll invest more in coaching them.” I’ve said versions of these things myself. Occasionally they’re true. More often, they’re a way of deferring a decision we already know we need to make.
Recognizing which of these motivations is driving your behavior is the first step toward honest self-assessment. And honest self-assessment is the prerequisite for making the right call.
Making the Decision and Making It Well
The decision to move someone out of a role is one of the hardest things a leader does, and it should be hard. If it’s easy for you, I’d worry about something else entirely. But difficulty is not a reason for inaction. I’ve found a few principles helpful in navigating this well.
First, separate the person from the role. Someone can be talented, hardworking, and a good cultural fit while still being wrong for a specific position. This isn’t a judgment of their worth; it’s an acknowledgment that the role requires something they don’t currently have, and that the timeline for developing it doesn’t align with what the business needs. Sometimes the right answer is moving them to a different role internally where their strengths are better matched. Not every personnel change has to be an exit.
Second, be honest about whether you’ve actually set them up to succeed. Have you been clear about expectations? Have you given direct, specific feedback about what needs to change? Have you provided the resources and support they need? If you’ve been quietly doing their work instead of having these conversations, then part of the failure is yours. Own that, and then course-correct by having the conversations you should have had months ago. Give people a genuine chance to rise to the challenge, but set a clear timeline in your own mind for when you’ll make the call if things don’t change.
Third, act with both urgency and compassion. I’ve never once looked back on a personnel decision I made too slowly and thought I timed it right. Every single time, I wished I had acted sooner, not because I didn’t care about the person, but because the delay made things worse for everyone, including them. The most compassionate thing you can do is be direct, be fair, and help them land well, whether that’s in a different role or at a different company.
Ultimately, your job as a leader is to build an organization that can execute without you being in the details. If you’re consistently doing someone’s job for them, you’re failing at your own, not because you lack capability, but because you’re applying that capability at the wrong level. The hardest part isn’t recognizing the problem. It’s having the courage to act on what you already know.