Resources
Some Problems Are Not Mine to Fix
Unstuck Monthly | August 2026
Decide what is yours to take back, and what to leave with others.
Back in June I made a case for taking your hands off one thing over the summer, so that you could come back to see your team can handle it without you. This would, hopefully, start to free up your time for higher-order thinking work. So I spent the summer running the experiment myself.
I am a problem-solver by temperament and by training. My closest people will joke that sometimes I have a solution in search of a problem. Candidly (and with a small amount of self-awareness), that observation may be more about me reaching for what already belongs to someone else, usually before that person is ready to take action on the issue.
As a rule follower, I had to create a mantra to which I would align my behavior: some problems are not mine to fix. I said it aloud enough times this summer that it started catching me mid-reach, in the half second before I stepped into something that already had an owner.
Instead of looking for the small failures that I could address, I started to get comfortable with the discomfort of something remaining unresolved on my timeline.
Looking back, I think my problem-solving did, in fact, create real value for others. It also trained them to wait for me to do the work.
Many of us are transitioning from a (hopefully) relaxing summer to an all-out corporate sprint that happens between Labor Day and the Winter Holidays in the U.S.A. So while we may have practiced letting go in June, the question is whether it survives the upcoming crunch.
Why the reflex wins
I worked with a leader whose grip was total. Every decision routed through him, every draft came back marked up, every meeting depended on his shifting priorities. He believed that his attention was the thing holding the place together.
What his attention was actually doing was teaching a few hundred people that their judgment did not count for much. Morale went first, quietly, in the way people stop offering input. Productivity followed because teammates were afraid of doing something wrong and then getting scolded. Nothing collapsed, which is what made it so hard to see. The place simply slowed to the speed of one man’s inbox.
This leader never relaxed his grip of control, but we can. After a summer of delegation, the reflex to retake everything in September comes from the same place his grip did. Time away creates a sense of urgency that there is ground to make up, and the fastest way to feel like we have made it up is to put our hands back on everything we can reach.
Re-entry is a decision
The word “back” is doing a lot of damage here. We talk about coming back to work, back to the desk, back to normal, and the word smuggles in an assumption that the arrangement we left is the one waiting for us. In fact, something ran without us for a few weeks, and it ran differently, and some of those differences are better than what we had before we stepped back in June.
The question in front of us is which parts of the old arrangement deserve to come back, if at all.
Everything we released falls into one of two categories. Some of it is higher-order work that genuinely requires our judgment, our relationships, our authority to spend political capital. That work belongs to us and we should pick it up without apology. (Remember, you were likely placed in this role for your unique brain and perspective.) The rest is work that only ever routed through us because it always had, and the summer just proved it does not need to.
Sorting one from the other may take some time, and this can be part of our transition plan this month. Without a proper ramp-up, September just starts and we’re back to business as usual.
Prepare to be flexible
The second mantra I focused on this summer: prepare to be flexible. Most of 2026 has been a series of never-ending transitions across home life and work, and I expect the rest of it to be the same. This mantra came out of accepting that some things sit too far outside my control to be worth my grip, and that the useful response is to get ready for a range of outcomes instead of forcing one.
On re-entry after the summer holiday (or any break from work), preparing to be flexible lets us tolerate the version of the work that comes back looking different from how we left it. It is now someone else’s process, someone else’s judgment call, or a decision made a few weeks ago that we would have made another way. In these moments, we may have an immediate impulse to “correct” the situation. What we owe in that moment is a single question, which is whether the thing is going wrong or just going differently.
When something is wrong, fix it. If the new normal is just different, can we get over it? (Or even better, deliver praise to our teammates for owning it without us?)
An inventory
Write down every responsibility you handed off, dropped, or simply let sit over the last six weeks. Be honest and include the things you did not consciously delegate, perhaps the things that just went quiet.
Then mark each one: take it back or hand it off.
For anything you mark “take it back,” write the reason next to it. If the reason is that it requires your authority or your judgment specifically, good. If the reason is that you would do it better, or faster, or that it is easier to just handle it yourself, that is the grip talking, and you should hand it off.
When you’ve decided which tasks and responsibilities you’re not taking back, the next step is to tell at least one person what you’re doing (for accountability). This takes nerve to say it out loud because once you’ve officially delegated, it makes it harder to take back later.
What September asks of us
While we’re away from work, we learn more about our teammates and what they’re capable of. But that learning has a short shelf life if we don’t do anything with it. As we transition into work, routines settle again. If we return to the old ways, nobody will flag it for us, because a leader with their hands on everything looks like a leader working hard. Worse, we walk the team back to where morale was before.
So remember that some problems are not ours to fix, and instead prepare to be flexible. This is a more demanding posture than it sounds. It is the readiness to accept a version of the work that runs without our fingerprints on all of it, and that readiness is what lets us spend the next few months on the things only we can do. That is the job we were promoted into, and it has been waiting while we handled everything else.
Coda
Over the weekend as I was polishing this month’s newsletter, famed psychology professor and author Angela Duckworth published a guest essay in The New York Times. She discussed the “illusion of self-sufficiency,” the false belief that an individual, group, or system can exist, thrive, and remain completely independent of external support, community, or resources.
Professor Duckworth makes special note of how this illusion sits comfortably with Americans’ predisposition to pursue rugged individualism over interdependency.
I recommend reading her essay as a reminder of why the work we do is best done with others, in community.
“The prompts and resources he offered gave me a much deeper level of self-awareness and language to identify root causes.”
— Molly, Managing Director of Strategic Partnerships
During times of transition and re-entry, a thought partner helps you decide what to pick up and what to leave with others. If you need support leading your team, let’s talk about how to spend your attention on the work only you can do.
Great conversations start with shared insights. My coaching practice, like this newsletter, thrives on connections. If you know someone who's navigating their own sticking points, I’d love for you to share this with them.
