Why Your Capability Cannot Be the Operating Model
THE FEMALE SHIFT READING SHELF Multipliers by Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown
When my team grew from around 10 people to around 100, one thing became impossible to ignore: My own capability could no longer be the operating model for the organisation.
I had built much of my career on being able to walk into complexity and make it workable. I saw problems early, connected the pieces and kept moving until the work was done. Those habits helped me earn trust and take on increasingly complex roles.
They did not suddenly become bad habits. The scale changed what good leadership required. If I continued to hold the difficult questions, the context and the quality standard myself, the organisation could only become more dependent on me. My value had to change with the role.
That experience is one reason Multipliers by Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown belongs on The Female Shift Reading Shelf. The book gave me useful language for a transition many capable leaders find uncomfortable: Moving from being the person who provides the answers to the person who enables better thinking across the team.
What Multipliers Gets Right
Wiseman and McKeown distinguish between leadership behaviour that amplifies the intelligence around us and behaviour that reduces how much other people think, contribute and take ownership. What makes the idea useful is that diminishing behaviour does not require arrogance or bad intent. A well-intentioned leader can become what the authors call an Accidental Diminisher. Expertise, energy, vision and a genuine wish to help can fill so much space that other people begin to contribute less. The leader remains busy and indispensable. The team becomes good at waiting.
I do not find the label itself particularly important. The question underneath is what matters: Does my leadership make other people more capable of thinking, deciding and acting—or more dependent on me? This is not an argument for making yourself smaller. It is an invitation to examine how your capability works at a larger scale. Leadership still requires expertise, judgement and, at times, decisive intervention. It also requires you to create capacity that does not disappear when you leave the room.
The Capable Carrier
In my corporate experience and in my coaching work, I see a particular version of this pattern among women. I think of her as the capable carrier. She is the person who prepares thoroughly, anticipates risks and notices what is about to fall through the cracks. She remembers the context behind the decision and often picks up the coordination that nobody formally owns. When the work becomes difficult or politically sensitive, people turn to her because she has proved that she can be trusted.
Capability becomes credibility. Credibility brings responsibility. Because she carries that responsibility well, more of it finds its way to her. For a long time, this can be a successful career strategy. The difficulty begins when the role changes but the strategy does not. The team grows. The work becomes more strategic. Decisions multiply. A way of working that once demonstrated value can now limit the time available for influence, longer-term thinking and the development of other people.
This pattern is not only a matter of individual preference. Experimental research published in the American Economic Review found that women were more likely than men to volunteer for low-promotability tasks, to be asked to take them on and to accept those requests. The study addresses a specific type of work; it does not explain every form of carrying. It does show that expectations and task allocation influence who repeatedly ends up saying yes.
Seen in this wider context, over-functioning can be an intelligent adaptation to an environment that rewards availability, predictability and low risk. Recognising that matters. Otherwise, we take a pattern partly created by the organisation and hand it back to the woman as another self-improvement assignment.
When the Role Changes
A larger leadership role asks for a different expression of capability. In an expert role, the quality of your own answer may be central to your contribution. As scope grows, your judgement still matters, but you increasingly express it through priorities, standards, decisions and the capability you build in others.
The leadership question changes from Can I solve this? to How do I create the conditions in which this team can solve more without depending on me for every answer?
This is a transition in leadership identity rather than a correction of personality. The task is to decide where your capability, care and ambition create the greatest value now.
If that transition does not happen, the cost is felt by the whole person. Constantly carrying the thinking, follow-up and emotional temperature of the work uses energy that is no longer available for strategy, recovery or life outside the role. Being indispensable may look like success while becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
Letting Go Needs Somewhere to Land
This is where simple advice to delegate more falls short. Letting go is useful only when ownership has somewhere to land.
The person must be able to tolerate not answering first. That can be difficult when being prepared and useful has become part of her professional identity, or when she has good reason to worry that a team mistake will be judged as her failure.
The role needs clear decision rights. People cannot take genuine ownership if they lack the authority, information or access required to act. A vague handover followed by constant correction is not development. It is confusion with a motivational label attached.
The system must allow people to learn. If senior stakeholders bypass the agreed ownership whenever pressure rises, or if every imperfect step is treated as proof that delegation was a mistake, responsibility will return to the safest pair of hands. No amount of personal self-regulation can fix that alone.
Women can face an additional tension here. They may be expected to remain supportive and available while also demonstrating authority and strategic range. Stepping back without clear organisational cover can therefore carry a different credibility risk. A Person × Role × System perspective helps us ask a fairer question: What does this leader need to change, and what must the environment stop rewarding or pulling back towards her?
Helping and Building Capacity
Helping is often kind, necessary and efficient. It becomes less helpful when it is automatic.
When I answer every difficult question, I may save time today while teaching the team to wait for me tomorrow. When I correct work before they have had the chance to review it themselves, I protect the immediate result but remove part of the learning. When I absorb every uncertainty, I may keep the atmosphere calm while taking on a level of responsibility that no role can sustain indefinitely.
Building capacity asks for a different form of support. The leader makes the outcome and quality standard clear, gives the person enough context and authority to act, agrees when to check in and defines when escalation is necessary. She asks for the other person's thinking before offering her own.
Sometimes she still intervenes. A serious risk, an ethical issue, a crisis or a genuine capability gap may require direct action. The aim is not to become passive. It is to distinguish between intervention that protects the work and intervention that mainly relieves the leader's discomfort.
Leadership development is rather like gardening. You create the conditions for growth, pay attention to what is needed and intervene when something is genuinely at risk. You do not pull the leaves upwards and call it development.
The Multiplying Capacity Check
Choose one decision, problem or piece of work that repeatedly comes back to you. Give yourself 10 minutes and work through four questions.
1. What is asking me to step in? Is there a material risk I need to manage, a capability gap I need to support or discomfort in me that I need to regulate? More than one may be true. Name them separately.
2. What condition is missing? Does this person need context, authority, access, feedback, a clearer standard or simply enough time to think? Offer the missing condition rather than automatically supplying the solution.
3. What ownership can remain with them? Clarify the outcome they own, the decision they can make and what they should bring back to you. A useful prompt is: What is your recommendation and what support do you need from me?
4. What will make this responsible? Agree the quality standard, next check-in, visible risks and escalation threshold. Clear boundaries make it safer for both of you to resist the old pattern.
Finish with one commitment:
This week, I will give ______ ownership of ______. I will support them with ______ and keep the standard clear around ______.
The experiment is small on purpose. You are not reorganising the whole team. You are testing whether a different piece of leadership builds more independent judgement and ownership in the people around you.
A Different Measure of Leadership Value
The question I take from Multipliers is simple: Does my capability create more capability around me, or does the work still succeed mainly because I carry it?
It deserves to be asked with curiosity rather than judgement. The old pattern may have been useful, respected and necessary for a long time. There will still be moments when the deadline is real, the risk is high and leadership means making the decision yourself.
But if being indispensable has become both your value and your constraint, the pattern deserves closer attention. Career success that holds up over time cannot depend on one highly capable woman indefinitely absorbing responsibilities that the wider system has failed to distribute.
At greater scale, leadership value becomes visible in two places: the results you achieve and the capacity that remains when you are no longer at the centre of every answer.
Continue the Shift
SHIFT is where I work with women who know they are capable but sense that their current way of carrying responsibility no longer fits the scope of the role they hold or the leader they are becoming. We look at the person, the role and the system so that sustainable performance does not become another instruction to simply try harder.
In a Career Clarity Call, we can look at one current leadership situation and decide whether SHIFT would be a useful next step. You do not need to arrive with the answer. That would defeat the point. You can book a Clarity Call here .
Stay courageous,
Katharina
It's in you!
About the Book
Book: Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter
Authors: Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown
Publisher: HarperBusiness
First published: 2010
Recommended for: Women moving into larger leadership roles who want to strengthen judgement, ownership and capability across their teams
Sources and further reading
Bringing Out the Best in Your People by Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown, Harvard Business Review, May 2010
Gender Differences in Accepting and Receiving Requests for Tasks with Low Promotability by Linda Babcock, Maria P. Recalde, Lise Vesterlund and Laurie Weingart, American Economic Review, March 2017
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