From dependency to autonomy: what a leader's team reveals about whether development sticks
He ran a continent as sales director of a global healthcare company. A career that went promotion, promotion, promotion, barely pausing for breath. He was on a plane 75% of the time. Sixteen-hour days. Any team, any country, any hour, he swooped in and saved the day. The seventh cavalry, arriving on schedule.
Impressive, right? That's what everyone thought. Including him.
Then his body started sending invoices. Nothing dramatic at first. Just signs. The kind you wave away with "I'm fine". He half-believed it. Fit, strong, tireless, and quietly, underneath, running on empty.
He came to me stuck in a loop he couldn't name. Something went wrong. A report didn't deliver. So he did it himself. No matter when, no matter where. And the more he did, the less his teams did. He was starting to see it: his people doing less, him doing more. Somewhere along the way the hierarchy had flipped. On paper, he was the boss. In practice, he worked for his teams.
Let me name what was happening. Because it wasn't a character flaw. It was structural.
Three systemic principles, all unbalanced!
Systems run on a few of these, mostly invisible. Unbalance them and the system pushes back, usually through the person least willing to notice. He'd unbalanced all three.
The first is belonging. Everyone in a system has a right to a place. He'd included everyone and excluded himself, prioritising others' needs and neglecting his own. The second is order, or hierarchy. Each level has its job. He'd mostly climbed down a level or two to do work that wasn't his and wasn't what he was paid for. Sometimes he climbed up and did his own boss's. Either way, he was everywhere except his own level. The third is exchange between giving and taking. Healthy systems give and take. He gave to the company, the peers, the reports, the clients, the suppliers. And he never asked for help. It didn't even occur to him that he could. His body was simply doing the accounting nobody else would.
The team wasn't lazy. The system rewarded it.
Here's the dynamic most leaders miss.
Why stretch, why struggle, why stay late when the boss will swoop in and fix it? The cavalry always comes. So everyone relaxed and leaned on the God-boss. The more he rescued, the more dependent they became. The more dependent they became, the more he had to rescue. A golden cage, built unconsciously and with the best intentions. Indispensable to everyone, and quietly running on empty. He couldn't see a way out. From where he stood, the bars looked like the job.
You're never outside the system.
That was his blind spot. He thought he sat above the mess, steering it, the one who fixed things. But there is no above. He was in the pattern, as much as anyone. Worse, he was holding it in place. And that's the good news: the moment you know you're part of it, you get a lever back. Not the whole system, just your own position. So that's where we started. Not with a reorg. Not with a speech. With him.
I gave him the LeadLoom© tool, a practical way to shift a leader from rescuer to resource. In practice it's simple: it changes where the leader stands in a relationship, handing the weight of a problem back to the person who owns it, so support flows up on request instead of down on reflex. Before, a report would arrive with a problem and leave without it, he'd taken it. Now, the same problem stayed with the person who owned it, and he offered support only once they'd made the first move themselves
There was resistance first, naturally. Change always knocks before it settles. Then it did. Two months in, no one questioned it anymore. Newcomers absorbed it as simply "how we work here", never knowing there'd been another way.
And the paradox that stunned him most: He did less and achieved more. Teams suddenly aligned, accountable, independent and happier, too. He moved. And because he moved, the system moved with him. He could disappear for weeks, and the teams kept doing exactly what they were supposed to do. He could finally do his own job (strategy, growth), the work he was actually paid for. His life outside work came back too. Time away from the house dropped from 75-80% to under 40%. Working hours came down to a heroic ten on average. He dug up hobbies he'd buried years ago. His health finally got its own slot in the calendar. One move, three systems realigned: the team, the leader, his personal life. A three-for-one he never saw coming.
Not the leader, not the team. The relationship.
Don't watch just the leader, or just the team. Watch what happens between them. Dependency never lives in a person, it lives in the loop: he rescues, they relax, he rescues more. Autonomy is the same loop reversed. So, ask what the teams can do now that only the boss could do before. Ask what happens when he's unreachable. Autonomy isn't installed in people. It emerges between them, once the leader takes their own place, no higher, no lower, and stops being the bottleneck.
The pattern told the whole story. It always does.
If this felt familiar, that's your diagnosis, and it isn't a time-management problem, or a competence one. It's a system one. Two questions: Have you excluded yourself from your own system by taking everyone else's place instead of your own? And is anything at all flowing back to you, or is it all give and no take? Belonging, order, exchange. Get those back in balance, and you won't need to work harder. You'll need to work less.
About the author: Dr Jordi Escartín
Dr Jordi Escartín is a systemic executive coach, trainer and consultant. He is an Accredited Full Professor at the University of Barcelona and Visiting Professor of Organisational Behaviour & Systemic Leadership at King's College London, and a Professional Certified Coach (PCC, ICF) with 3,000+ coaching hours. Over two decades he has coached and advised founders, CEOs and senior leaders across 200+ organisations worldwide, from fast-growing startups to global names such as Amazon, Mercedes-Benz Group, Samsung and Bayer, and published widely on leadership, well-being and dignity at work. He is the creator of LeadLoom©, a practical approach for moving leaders and teams from dependency to autonomy. Connect on LinkedIn, or at jordiescartin.com and metaweaves.com.
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