The Team Killer☠️ - Why Your Leadership Style Is Destroying Team Performance

September 12, 2025

Hi Reader

Part 3: The Confidence Series - Final

The feedback caught me totally off guard.

"You're killing our creativity," one of the ‘leadership group’ said during a quarterly review. "Every time we bring you an idea, you improve it. And you wonder why we’re not coming up with new stuff anymore?"

I thought I was being helpful. Collaborative. Adding value through experience.

Turns out I was suffocating the very innovation I thought I was cultivating.

That conversation ten years ago forced me to face up to the uncomfortable reality that the leadership behaviours that made me feel most effective were making my team progressively weaker.

It took the wind out of my sails.

It shouldn't have to happen to you too. Let's unpack an approach that could work for you...

When Helping is counterproductive

You hire brilliant people….and you proceed to train them to stop being brilliant.

You do this through well-intentioned leadership behaviours that feel supportive but actually create learned helplessness.

Mad stuff.

Watch yourself in your next few team interactions. How often do you:

Jump in with solutions when people are still thinking through problems
Polish ideas that were already good enough to test
Provide answers instead of asking questions that spark thinking
Take over conversations when they slow down or get stuck

Each of these feels like leadership. Each slowly erodes your team's problem-solving muscles.

Leadership confidence operates like a seesaw. When yours goes up through helping, theirs goes down through depending.

One coaching client seen this, accidentally, during a period when urgent family issues kept him away from the office for three weeks.

He expected chaos. Instead, his team solved problems faster and more creatively than they had in months.

"They didn't need me to make decisions, they needed me to get out of their way so they could make them."

The revelation stung because it challenged his entire identity as a leader.

3 Leadership Styles That Kill Teams

Most leadership development focuses on what to do. Understanding what stops working matters more.

Style 1: The Immediate Improver

You hear an idea and immediately see ways to make it better. You share these improvements because you want the best possible outcome.

What you think happens: The idea gets stronger through your input.

What actually happens: Your team learns their initial thinking isn't good enough. They start bringing you problems instead of solutions.

Style 2: The Safety Net

You catch mistakes before they become problems. You fill gaps before they cause issues. You prevent failures through careful oversight.

What you think happens: Your team operates more smoothly with your protection.

What actually happens: Your team stops developing failure-recovery skills. They become risk-averse because they know you'll handle consequences.

Style 3: The Question Answerer

You provide quick, accurate responses to any uncertainty. Your team appreciates having someone who knows how to handle complex situations.

What you think happens: Your team becomes more efficient with access to your expertise.

What actually happens: Your team stops building their own expertise. They develop question-asking skills instead of problem-solving skills.

All three styles feel like strong leadership. All three are a path to weak teams.

Because this is when Competence Backfires

Outstanding individual performers often become mediocre team leaders because they can't resist demonstrating their competence.

You show competence by solving problems quickly. You build competence in others by letting them struggle with problems appropriately.

These two goals conflict constantly. Your instinct to show value fights against your responsibility to develop capability.

Most leaders resolve this conflict by showing value. Teams suffer accordingly.

How can you address this?

Leaders who build exceptional teams operate from a counterintuitive principle: Your job is to become unnecessary for day-to-day excellence.

They measure success by how well things work when they're not involved.

The Three-Layer Withdrawal

Layer 1: Stop providing immediate solutions. Start asking: "What approaches have you considered?"

Layer 2: Stop improving good-enough ideas. Start asking: "What would happen if we tested this as-is?"

Layer 3: Stop preventing failures. Start asking: "How will we recover if this goes wrong?"

I know…each layer feels uncomfortable. Honestly though, each builds team strength.

To see it through you’ve got to embrace discomfort

Real team development requires tolerating specific discomforts:

Watching people work slower than you would. Speed comes from repetition. Taking over prevents repetition.

Seeing solutions that could be better. Perfect solutions from you prevent good solutions from them.

Allowing recoverable mistakes. Mistake prevention stops learning. Mistake recovery builds resilience.

Enduring silence in meetings. Your quick answers prevent their slow thinking. Thinking gets faster through practice.

The goal isn't to become passive. It's to redirect your activity from doing to developing.

If this feels right and makes sense then take the next steps...

For two days, track every team interaction. Note each time you:

Provided a solution before they finished explaining the problem
Improved an idea instead of exploring why they liked their version
Answered a question they could have figured out themselves
Took control of a conversation that was moving slowly

Count the instances. The number reveals how much team development you're accidentally preventing.

As a point of contrast & reference, “strong” teams exhibit specific behaviours that weak teams don't:

They debate ideas vigorously without looking to you for resolution
They propose solutions you hadn't considered
They recover from setbacks without escalating to you
They take creative risks despite uncertainty about outcomes
They challenge your thinking respectfully but directly

If your team doesn't do these things regularly, examine your leadership style for development-blocking behaviours.

Creating conditions where teams become exceptional requires patience with their current limitations and faith in their future capabilities.

You have to believe they can develop competence you don't see yet. You have to resist fixing problems they need to learn from. You have to accept slower progress in exchange for sustainable capability.

Most leaders find this harder than any technical skill they've ever learned.

A Force Multiplier

When you successfully shift from being the smartest person in the room to being the person who makes the room smarter, several things happen:

Problems get solved at their source instead of escalated to you. Innovation increases because more minds engage creatively. Resilience improves because the team develops multiple problem-solvers. Your own strategic thinking improves because you're not buried in operational decisions.

Your confidence starts coming from their growth rather than your performance.

The Final Confidence Paradox

Over these three parts, we've explored how traditional confidence approaches often backfire:

Part 1: Sounding certain signals inexperience to real experts

Part 2: Optimising to be right prevents learning from being wrong.
Part 3: Demonstrating competence can prevent developing competence in others.

Can you see a pattern emerge here?

It’s my contention that Confidence built on individual performance has a ceiling. Confidence built on collective capability has no limit.

The leaders you aspire to discover that their greatest confidence comes not from being indispensable, but from building something that thrives without them.

What would change if you measured your leadership confidence by how capable your team becomes rather than how much they need you?

Whenever you and your team(s) are ready try this experiment.

Choose one area where you consistently provide immediate help. Then, for the next week, replace helping with developing.

Try this.

Instead of giving solutions, ask what solutions they're considering. Instead of preventing mistakes, help them plan recovery strategies. Instead of improving their ideas, help them test and refine their own.

Track what happens to both their capability and your stress levels.

Building exceptional teams requires exceptional restraint from you even though you know you could do things faster yourself.

The confidence to let others grow often requires more courage than the confidence to do everything yourself.

If you recognise patterns of well-intentioned leadership that might be limiting your team's development, or if you want to explore the sophisticated balance between supporting your team and building their independent capability, let's have a conversation. The most effective leaders understand that true confidence comes not from being needed, but from building something so capable it could succeed without them. Sometimes the most confident thing you can do is trust others to become as competent as you believe they can be.

Our first conversation is without charge…arrange it now at https://calendly.com/p_clarke/20min

Another Newsletter you might find useful....

Leadership Unlocked

Bestselling Author and Harvard Business School Professor, Ranjay Gulati

I’m Ranjay Gulati: a professor at Harvard Business School, an organizational sociologist, and the bestselling author of numerous books, including Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies. My work explores how individuals and organizations can reach their full potential by grounding themselves in purpose, clarity, and bold action.