There's a healthcare CEO Bill coached — smart, driven, impeccable résumé — who ran a national company the same way they ran eighth-grade group projects: by doing everyone else's work. Episode five of the Busy Is Broken series is about the moment that reflex stops being a strength and starts being the bottleneck. The overachiever who took over the group project in middle school got praised for it. Decades later, the same instinct shows up at the C-suite, and it doesn't scale — it suffocates.

Lee came into a healthcare empire valued in the hundreds of millions. From the start, Lee second-guessed the leadership team, reworked slide decks at midnight, edited marketing copy mid-flight, and jumped into facilitation exercises Bill was running — not to collaborate, but to control. Not cruel. Not incompetent. Just an overachiever reflex from school that had never been updated. The result: people stopped presenting detailed plans because they knew Lee would reshuffle them. They stopped proposing creative solutions because Lee would override them. They learned helplessness. The best ones left.

The gap is the giveaway. If you asked Lee, Lee was "protecting the company." If you asked the team, Lee was suffocating it. That gap — between how the leader describes the behavior and how the team experiences it — is the micromanager's blind spot. Lee eventually got it. Replaced wrong hires with right ones, stopped covering for empty seats, started letting go. The company stabilized. But it took years of damage and talent loss before the reflex broke. This week's invitation: when someone brings you a draft, a plan, a decision, notice the impulse to edit. Before you touch it, ask: "Is this good enough to ship, even if I'd do it differently?" If yes, let it go.

Links:

Busy Is Broken book and free diagnostic: https://busyisbroken.com

Q20 Growth Diagnostic: https://scalingcoach.com/Q20

Mentioned in this episode:

Busy Is Broken

Have you ever had a week where you're completely slammed but somehow nothing actually moved? Is this one of those weeks? That’s not really a time problem. It's a busyness habit problem. My new book, Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More, is about growing by doing less, not more. Read or listen to a sample chapter, over at busyisbroken.com. That's busyisbroken.com. Also on amazon and other booksellers.