If You Want to Lead, You Don't Get to Have "Your" Problems Anymore
By Derek Neighbors on December 29, 2025
Leadership has a price. Most people do not see it until they are paying it.
Random Tuesday. Nothing was on fire when I went to bed. When I woke up, my phone was full of messages that all sounded urgent. Production issue. Customer escalation. A team conflict. A decision that could not wait.
None of those problems originated with me.
All of them were mine the moment I accepted leadership. That is how it works.
That is the part most people miss when they say they want to lead. Leadership is accepting responsibility for outcomes you did not directly create. It is not just influence and vision. It is load. It is being the person the system leans on when pressure enters.
If you are not willing to carry that load, you do not want leadership. You want status. And yet, leadership well-practiced is essential to human flourishing. Without people who will hold responsibility for others, systems collapse and potential is wasted.
At the same time, leaders who carry everything become the bottleneck. They become resentful. They become reactive. They start disappearing, not physically, but emotionally. They protect themselves by going numb.
The move is straightforward: accept the trade, and redesign the system so you are not paying the tax by accident every day.
The Surface Problem
Most leaders diagnose the wrong thing.
They think the issue is skill. They need better communication. Better delegation. Better time management.
Sometimes that is true, but the recurring pain is usually structural.
What people think is wrong
Leaders tend to reach for explanations that feel flattering:
- They need more authority.
- They need better training.
- They need a stronger team.
- They need fewer meetings.
Those explanations keep the leader at the center. They also keep the leader stuck.
Obvious symptoms
The leadership tax is the cost paid in attention, energy, and focus when the system routes problems upward instead of solving them locally. You can spot it when it shows up as predictable patterns:
- Every small decision escalates.
- The leader becomes the default resolver.
- The team waits for approval, even when approval is not required.
- Problems show up late, when they are expensive.
- The leader cannot think because the leader is always reacting.
Common solutions that fail
When leaders try to fix a structural problem with personality, they default to tactics:
- Add more meetings to “stay aligned.”
- Add process to “reduce escalation.”
- Hire a new layer to “create capacity.”
- Tell people to “be proactive.”
If the organizational culture punishes initiative, whether through leader behavior, process design, or how failures are handled, none of that works.
The System
Leadership is a system of information flow, decision rights, accountability, and emotional tone.
When those are unclear, the system does what systems do. It finds the easiest path to safety.
In most organizations, the safest path is escalation.
The underlying structure
If a person cannot predict the penalty for being wrong, they will avoid deciding.
If a person cannot disagree without consequences, they will stay quiet.
If a person has seen someone get blamed for an honest miss, they will route risk upward.
This is not laziness. It is self protection.
It is also why a leader who says “my door is always open” can accidentally train a team to bring everything to that door.
The hidden dynamics
There are a few forces that keep the tax in place.
First, much of the escalation that drains leaders is rooted in fear of being wrong and getting punished for it. Some escalation is appropriate: genuine uncertainty, missing information, high stakes requiring senior judgment. But the chronic kind is people covering their ass. They call it alignment. It is protection.
Second, leaders teach people how to treat them.
If you rescue, the team learns helplessness.
If you explode, the team learns secrecy.
If you stay steady and ask clear questions, the team learns agency.
Third, the leader’s emotional state becomes contagious. A reactive leader creates a reactive room. A calm leader gives the room permission to think. This does not mean leaders cannot signal urgency when urgency is real. But there is a difference between deliberate intensity and unregulated volatility. The first is a tool. The second is a failure of self-command.
This is where sophrosyne matters. Self mastery is not a mood or a technique. It is the cultivation of a well-ordered soul, and it is a leadership requirement. The capacity for this virtue exists in anyone with rational agency, whether they hold a title or not. If you cannot regulate yourself under pressure, you will multiply the pressure.
Root causes
The leadership tax gets expensive when:
- Decision boundaries are unclear.
- People get punished for reasonable mistakes.
- Conflict is treated as disloyalty.
- Leaders are rewarded for heroics.
That last one is self-reinforcing. If the leader gets praised for saving the day, the leader will keep saving the day. The team will keep waiting for rescue. The system will keep escalating.
And the leader will eventually break.
The Leverage Points
Small changes in the right place create big shifts.
If you try to solve “leaders are overwhelmed” by adding more leader capacity, you miss the point. The tax is being generated upstream.
The leverage is in decision clarity and consequences.
Leverage point 1: Make decision rights explicit
Write down what the team can decide without you.
Write down what must be escalated.
Write down what is only a heads up.
When people do not know where the line is, they assume the line is at the leader’s desk.
Leverage point 2: Protect reasonable decisions, even when outcomes are imperfect
If you punish every miss, you buy escalation forever.
The goal is not perfect outcomes. The goal is strong judgment exercised close to the work.
That is phronesis. Practical wisdom looks like discernment, restraint, and good calls made with incomplete information.
If you only reward certainty, you will train people to wait.
Leverage point 3: Stop rewarding escalation as a sign of “alignment”
Escalation can be necessary. It should not be a default.
When someone escalates, treat it as a coaching moment, not a failure and not a badge of responsibility.
The leader’s job is to develop better judgment, not to collect more problems.
Leverage point 4: Treat steadiness as performance
Most organizations measure output and ignore emotional tone, until the culture collapses.
Steadiness is performance. When you are steady, other people can think. When you are volatile, they cannot.
If you are leading, you are building the room with your presence.
The Intervention
Here is how to pay the tax on purpose, and how to shrink it over time.
1. Separate ownership from involvement
There are three buckets:
- Decisions you own.
- Decisions the team owns.
- Decisions that require input, not approval.
If you cannot name the buckets, you will live in a fog, and fog creates escalation.
2. Install a simple decision rubric
Keep it simple enough that people actually use it:
- If it is reversible and low cost, decide fast.
- If it is irreversible or high risk, slow down and gather input.
- If it touches trust, safety, or ethics, escalate.
Jeff Bezos uses a similar distinction. Some decisions are one-way doors. Others are two-way doors. Most teams get stuck because they treat two-way door decisions like they require a trial. They do not. They require a call.
This gives people a map. It also gives you a way to coach decisions without humiliating people.
3. Demand a recommendation, not a problem dump
Do not let escalation be a handoff of anxiety.
When someone escalates, require:
- what they observed
- what they tried
- what they recommend next
- what tradeoffs they considered
This creates thinking. It also creates ownership.
4. Decide how you will show up when you are tired
Everyone can be calm when they are rested.
Leadership is being calm when you are not.
This does not mean suppressing emotion. It means choosing your response.
If you want to lead, you do not get to emotionally vomit on the room and then act surprised when the room becomes unstable.
5. Carry the weight, then redesign the system
Some seasons require you to carry more. That is real.
But if you keep carrying the same category of problems for months, that is not leadership. That is neglect of system design.
If your team cannot decide, ask why. The answer is usually one of these:
- They do not know the boundary.
- They do not trust the consequence.
- They do not have the skill yet.
Each one has a different fix. None of them is “work harder.”
The Results
These principles are not new management theory. They are timeless, rooted in how human systems have always functioned under pressure.
When you fix the system, the change is obvious.
What changes
- Decisions happen closer to the work.
- The leader stops being the bottleneck.
- Problems surface earlier.
- Capable people stay because they are treated like adults.
- The leader has space to think again.
Ripple effects
You will feel it in the culture.
The room gets quieter, not because people are afraid, but because people are not panicking.
The team stops asking for permission and starts asking for input.
The leader stops collecting problems and starts building capability.
Final Thoughts
Here is the challenge.
For the next seven days, track every escalation that hits you. Not the dramatic ones. The normal ones. The daily drip that steals your attention.
For each escalation, write down two things:
- What decision boundary was unclear.
- What consequence the person was afraid of.
That list is your roadmap. Fix those two things and the tax shrinks.
If you want a place to build this kind of leadership character with people who are serious about it, MasteryLab exists for that. It is for leaders who are done collecting responsibilities and ready to build the capacity, judgment, and self control to carry them well.
