The Day I Realised I Was the Problem

I thought I was a great manager.

I was wrong.

It was 2013. I had just been appointed Recruitment Manager at a large firm in Qatar. New role. New team. A lot of pressure to succeed.

I wanted to prove myself. So I did what many first-time managers do.

I controlled everything.

Daily meetings. Tight deadlines. Every task tracked, every output monitored. And when my team didn’t deliver… I didn’t coach them. I didn’t ask questions.

I just did it myself.

When the CVs weren’t screened… I screened them.

When negotiations fell apart… I stepped in and closed them.

When the client meetings weren’t prepared… I showed up and ran them.

I told myself I was being supportive. Accommodating. A team player.

I was driving at 100mph. Punctured wheels. Tank nearly empty. Windshield full of dust.

And I couldn’t see it.

Weeks passed. Then months.

My team stopped trying to figure things out. Why would they? I’d always step in.

My lunch breaks disappeared. Then my evenings. Then my weekends.

Office became my second home. Ten hours a day. Exhausted. Resentful. Completely burned out.

And still convinced the problem was my team.

One day I sat down with my CHRO.

I didn’t go in with a strategy. I went in because I was desperate.

“You manage fifteen people,” I said. “I can’t manage five. What am I missing?”

He looked at me. Calm. Direct.

“Usha, you need to stop doing the work and start delegating. I know you are a great recruiter. But it’s time you become a Leader.”

I sat with that for a long moment.

And slowly… I understood.

I hadn’t built a team. I had built a dependency. And I was the one who created it.

Everything changed after that conversation. Not overnight. But deliberately. One decision at a time.

I stopped filling in the gaps and started trusting my team to fill them.

I stopped giving answers and started asking questions.

And something remarkable happened.

They grew. The team that I thought couldn’t function without me… turned out to be capable all along.

I was just never giving them the space to show it.

Don’t be the wheel that drives them. Be the GPS that guides them.

A wheel does the work for the vehicle. A GPS trusts the driver to get there — and simply shows them the way. Your job as a leader is not to carry the load. It is to point toward the destination and believe they can reach it.

Trust them to find their own way.

Every time I stepped in with an answer, I sent a quiet message — I don’t think you can handle this. What my team needed wasn’t my solution. They needed space to find their own. A coaching leader stays in the room while someone works through it. And trusts that they will.

Empower them to rise — don’t just lift them.

Lifting is something you do to someone. Empowering is something you create with them. When I stopped rescuing my team and started believing in their capacity… they stopped waiting to be carried. They started leading themselves.

The lesson didn’t come from a leadership book or a training programme.

It came from one honest conversation with a CHRO who said what I needed to hear, not what I wanted to hear.

“It’s time you become a Leader.”

Are you leading your team… or controlling them like a micro manager?

I’m Usha. Executive Leadership Coach. Let’s talk.