Let Me Look Into It

Daniel was three months into his role as COO of a regional health system when the executive team faced a stalled software rollout in billing. The vendor was behind schedule, the department head was frustrated, and nobody in the room seemed sure what to do next.

Daniel was. He’d led a similar implementation at his previous company. He could see where the project had gone sideways and roughly what it would take to fix it.

“Let me look into it,” he said.

By the end of the meeting, the rollout was his.

Two months later, he was meeting with the vendor twice a week, reviewing workflow maps at night, and fielding calls from billing staff who had learned he was the person with answers. The project was back on track.  But strategic planning for the work he’d been hired to lead was behind schedule and he was feeling strained.

“Nobody asked me to take it on,” he told me. “I just saw what needed to happen.”

That sentence highlights a significant hazard for high-bandwidth people. You can acquire an obligation without ever agreeing to it.

When Seeing Becomes Owning

Capacity attracts demand. The more reliably you solve problems, the more problems find their way to you. As the old joke goes:

“Be the job, great or small, if I do it too well, I get stuck with it all.”

People learn that you can handle complexity, absorb surprises, and keep things moving when others get stuck. Eventually you learn this too.

These are real gifts. But they also create a particular vulnerability: you can mistake seeing what needs to be done for being the person who needs to do it.

The progression in how you feel is almost imperceptible. I can —> I should —> I must.

Each step feels reasonable. The need is real, someone would benefit, nobody volunteers, or perhaps no one else could even do it as well. So, somewhere along the way, possibility morphs into duty without ever passing through a decision.

What makes this pattern hard to interrupt is that being highly capable becomes part of your identity, just who you believe yourself to be. You’re the dependable one, the problem solver, the person who doesn’t flinch. There is genuine satisfaction in that because competence is hard-earned and being trusted matters.

Yet identity can imperceptibly become a set of instructions. I’m the one who can handle this. I don’t let people down. Once that happens, you stop asking whether a responsibility deserves you and start asking whether declining it would let others down or make you someone you don’t want to be. That emotional pull can cause you to misapply your capacity.

Daniel recognized himself here. He’d built his career on being the executive who fixed things. Handing the rollout back, he said, would have felt like admitting he couldn’t keep up.

Own it before you owe it

Every ‘automatic yes’ spends something you might have chosen to give elsewhere. Although it can be harder to track, capacity is a resource, much like money. We rarely tally the claims already made on our judgment, attention, and energy. We simply keep supplying them.

The costs of an ‘automatic yes’ go beyond us. When you routinely solve a problem because you can, someone else may never learn to solve it. Daniel’s director of revenue operations, Priya, had been ready to lead that rollout. She had the knowledge and the relationships, but she lacked the chance. When he stepped forward, she stepped back.

Meanwhile, the work only you can do gets deferred. Often that is less urgent than someone else’s request, so it waits patiently, sometimes for years.

Doing less is not the answer to a problem this significant. Many worthwhile endeavors require enormous commitments from us, and they deserve everything we give them. What matters is whether we’ve decided they deserve it.

That requires noticing that there’s a real space between having an ability and accepting an obligation. In that space, you acknowledge what you’re capable of and still ask whether it’s yours to carry. Maybe the answer is yes. But perhaps someone else needs the opportunity to grow. And sometimes the answer is no because saying yes here would draw your capacity away from something more deserving.

This is why I say: Own It Before You Owe It. Your capacity is a valuable resource. Owning it means taking responsibility for where it goes, including the obligations you deliberately choose to honor.

Daniel handed the rollout to Priya in January and stayed available as an advisor for one hour a week. It was uncomfortable at first. He caught himself drafting emails to the vendor that he didn’t need to send. By spring, Priya had the project running smoothly, and Daniel had presented his strategic plan to the board.

“The hardest part,” he told me, “was letting someone else be capable.”

Practice Invitation

Think of a responsibility you’re carrying that you never quite agreed to. Where did I can become I should? Ask whether it deserves your capacity, and who might grow if you handed it on.

You may still choose to keep it and give it everything you’ve got. Being able to carry something is one thing. Deciding it belongs to you is another.

And that's the Gist of it.

Thank you for reading.

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Marilyn Gist