You made it. So why are you so tired?

You’ve reached a new level.

Maybe you just landed the COO role, took over the family business, or finally pushed your own venture past the survival stage. You put in the late nights, mastered the details, and proved you could deliver.

You have the title, the team, and the reputation. By all accounts, you’ve arrived.

So why doesn’t it feel more secure?

It’s a strange paradox I see often: as leaders achieve more success, they often feel more anxious, not less. The stakes feel higher, and the fear of dropping the ball can be intense.

This isn’t just in your head. It’s a phenomenon I call The Risk Inversion.

The Instinct to Grip Tighter

In the early days of your career, your personal involvement was your safety mechanism. If a project was off the rails, you jumped in and fixed it. If a client was unhappy, you handled it personally.

Your heroism reduced the risk. You were The Operator, and your sheer personal output was the engine that drove success.

But now, the scope is bigger. The complexity has multiplied. And because you care deeply about doing a good job, it’s natural to default to the strategy that has always worked before: Work harder.

When we feel that familiar anxiety, the instinct is to grip the wheel tighter; we dive back into the details. We rewrite the emails. We “just quickly” fix the spreadsheet because it’s faster than explaining it.

It feels responsible. It feels like “leading from the front.”

But I invite you to consider a counterintuitive shift: At this level, your personal involvement is increasing the risk.

You Become the Bottle Neck

It comes from a good place—a desire to protect the quality of the work. You know that if you step back, things might slip. A deadline might be missed. A detail might be overlooked.

But when we dive back into the day-to-day to “guarantee” the result, we inadvertently cap the team’s capacity.

I see this happen with so many talented leaders. They are exhausted, not because they aren’t capable, but because they are trying to carry the weight of the entire organization.

By stepping in, we unintentionally train our teams—talented people who crave autonomy—to wait for permission. We teach them that we will always catch their mistakes, so they stop looking for them.

It creates a loop where you feel you must be involved to prevent failure, but your involvement prevents the team from growing enough to handle the failure on their own.

The Shift to Architect

Navigating this requires a shift in how we see our value.

It’s a move from being The Operator (who gets value from doing the work) to The Architect (who gets value from building the system that does the work).

This can feel unsettling. It feels like letting go of the steering wheel as the car speeds up. It requires trusting the systems you build and the people you lead, even when they do things differently than you would.

But this shift is the only way to build a sustainable future—for you and your team.

Where are you gripping the wheel a little too tightly today? What might happen if you let go, just a little?