When helping becomes harm
There is a moment in most leaders’ journeys when good intentions quietly become the problem.
It often arrives disguised as virtue. An open door. Availability. A reflex to help. A genuine desire to remove obstacles so others can succeed. From the outside, it looks like commitment; from the inside, it feels like responsibility. And yet, over time, the leader becomes heavier, slower, more crowded in the mind, while others appear oddly unburdened.
This is not a failure of care.
It is a failure of discernment.
“If this reflection is useful, and you want to turn it into real capacity in your team, I have created a Leader’s Guide to help you facilitate the conversation, surface what is really happening, and translate these ideas into shared practice. You can access the Leader’s Guide at the end of this article. If you know someone carrying the weight of leadership right now, please repost or share this article.”
The monkey that changes everything
The language comes most clearly from Ken Blanchard, whose work on situational leadership includes one of the most enduring and confronting metaphors in leadership literature, introduced in The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey. It is the idea of the monkey on the back.
A “monkey” represents a problem, a decision, or a next step that properly belongs to someone else. It starts on their back. They own it. They carry it. They feel its weight.
Then they walk into your office.
The conversation is usually reasonable, even responsible:
“Can I run something by you?”
“I just need your thoughts.”
“What would you do in this situation?”
And if the leader is not careful, something subtle happens. Advice turns into direction. Direction turns into ownership. By the time the conversation ends, the monkey has quietly climbed off their back and onto yours.
They leave lighter.
You leave heavier.
Blanchard’s insight is precise: when leaders take the monkey, they also take the responsibility, the anxiety, and the future work. The other person goes home relieved; the leader goes home burdened by a problem that was never meant to be theirs.
It is one of the most important lessons a leader can learn, not because it protects their time, but because it protects everyone else’s development.
My personal revelation
I still remember encountering this idea when I arrived in senior leadership, not at the middle level, but when responsibility genuinely widened. I was sitting with a growing to do list, feeling the familiar weight of overwhelm, when it dawned on me that almost every item on the page was not actually mine. In the spirit of being helpful, available, and supportive, I had slowly collected other people’s monkeys. What struck me most in that moment was not just the exhaustion I felt, but the clarity that followed. The relief was immediate. So was the realisation that my helpfulness had come at a cost.
What stayed with me even more strongly was the second insight. Every monkey I had taken had quietly removed a growth opportunity from someone else. Decisions that would have built confidence. Problems that would have formed judgement. Tension that would have developed leadership muscle. Looking back, I can see that I should have learned this lesson in middle leadership. I was able to cope then, or at least I thought I could. I could carry the extra weight and still perform. But coping is not the same as leading, and it certainly is not the same as developing others.
That is why this book became so formative for me. It did not just change how I managed my time. It changed how I understood responsibility, development, and trust. And it is why I now give Blanchard’s book to leaders as they step into middle leadership, not as a productivity tool, but as a foundational lesson in how to lead without stealing leadership from others.
The Paradox
The paradox is simple:
“When helping becomes harm.”
What makes this paradox uncomfortable is that it cuts directly across what people want from leaders.
People want help. They want reassurance. They want certainty. They want someone more experienced to absorb the complexity and return with an answer. In the short term, that feels kind, efficient, even protective.
But leadership is not about giving people what they want. It is about giving them what they need in order to grow.
And growth requires ownership.
When leaders take monkeys too quickly, too often, or too completely, they do more than exhaust themselves, they steal leadership development from others. They remove the very tension through which judgement is formed, courage is exercised, and capability is built.
This is why the monkey metaphor matters. It exposes that over-helping is not neutral. It shapes culture. It teaches people, subtly but powerfully, that escalation is safer than responsibility, that uncertainty should be handed upward, and that leadership resides at the top rather than being cultivated throughout the organisation.
The Saviour Complex
There is another layer to this problem. One that is harder to admit.
Some leaders struggle not because they cannot refuse monkeys, but because they do not want to.
The role of problem solver can become intoxicating. Being the person with the answer. The fixer. The hero who rescues others from difficulty. Over time, it can harden into what I have come to think of as the saviour complex, a quiet belief that the organisation works because I carry the load.
And like any drug, it offers a short-term reward: relevance, affirmation, control, and the comfort of being needed.
But it steals from everyone.
It steals the limelight, redirecting growth moments back to the leader.
It steals capacity, because others never have to stretch.
It steals leadership potential, because people learn to defer rather than decide.
The leader may feel indispensable, but the organisation becomes increasingly dependent and increasingly fragile.
Giving the monkey back’
This is where Craig Groeschel has been particularly clear and consistent. He speaks often about the danger of leaders becoming the bottleneck, not through control, but through over-functioning.
Groeschel argues that strong leaders do not add value by solving every problem themselves; they add value by developing problem-solvers. When leaders repeatedly step in, they may feel productive, but they are actually limiting the organisation’s future capacity.
In his language, empowerment is not abdication, and availability is not ownership. Leaders serve their teams best not by being the answer, but by creating the conditions where others can step into responsibility with confidence and clarity.
This requires restraint. It requires humility. And it requires leaders to confront the uncomfortable truth that being needed is not the same as being effective.
Escalation cultures and learned helplessness
In organisations where monkeys travel upward easily, escalation becomes the default operating system. Decisions that should be made close to the work drift higher. Problems are framed as requests for approval rather than opportunities for judgement.
This is not laziness. It is learned behaviour.
When leaders consistently take monkeys, people learn that ownership is optional and that risk can be offloaded. Over time, confidence erodes. Initiative narrows. The organisation becomes dependent on the leader’s presence for momentum. A fragile and unsustainable arrangement.
Ironically, the leader often feels most central at the exact moment the organisation is becoming weakest.
Discernment, not abandonment
In their book Boundaries (1992), Drs Henry Cloud and John Townsend use a simple and enduring distinction: boulders versus backpacks. The idea is straightforward. Some weights are genuinely crushing. Acute crises, significant disruption, moments where someone simply does not have the capacity to carry what is in front of them alone. These are boulders, and leadership at times requires stepping in to help carry them, not as a saviour, but as a stabiliser.
Other weights are the ordinary responsibilities of adult work. Problem solving, follow through, decision making, difficult conversations, judgement under pressure. This is the backpack. It belongs with the person whose role it is to carry it, because carrying it is how capability is formed.
Most boundary confusion in leadership happens when these are mislabelled. People treat a backpack like a boulder, seeking rescue from responsibilities they are actually ready to carry. Or they treat a boulder like a backpack, trying to push through genuine overwhelm alone.
So yes, sometimes leaders carry weight that is not theirs. But it should be the boulder in a real season of strain, not the backpack of everyday responsibility.
Refusing every monkey becomes indifference. Taking every monkey becomes control. Leadership lives in the disciplined tension between the two.
Vision as the organising centre
The question is not simply, should I help. The question is, does this align with who we are trying to become.
Vision allows leaders to return monkeys without becoming uncaring because it moves the decision out of personality and into purpose. When responsibility is framed through a shared vision, returning a monkey is not withdrawal of support, it is an act of formation. It says, this is where ownership needs to sit if we are serious about the kind of leaders this organisation exists to grow.
Decisions driven by alignment, rather than comfort or consensus, protect both the individual and the organisation from short term relief that quietly undermines long term growth.
Vision gives leaders a language for why responsibility sits where it does, even when that is uncomfortable in the moment.
The tension leaders must hold
Leaders must care deeply, without carrying everything.
They must remain accessible, without becoming the solution.
They must support people, without rescuing them from growth.
They must sometimes shoulder weight, but never forget to give it back.
The monkey metaphor endures because it names a hard truth: leadership is not just about what we take on, but what we refuse to take on… and why.
The greatest cost of taking other people’s monkeys is not burnout, though that is real enough. The deeper cost is an organisation full of capable people who never learned to carry their own load, because someone else carried it for them.
And that is a burden no leader should be willing to bear.
ABOUT THE LEADERS REFERENCED
Ken Blanchard
Ken Blanchard is a leadership author and management educator best known for making leadership principles practical and usable for everyday organisational life. He is widely recognised for his work on situational leadership and for co authoring The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey, where he popularised the “monkey” metaphor to describe how problems and decisions can shift from one person to another, often without either party noticing. In leadership contexts, his contribution is helping leaders clarify ownership, protect responsibility, and avoid becoming the bottleneck through well intentioned over involvement.
Craig Groeschel
Craig Groeschel is the founding and senior pastor of Life.Church and the host of the Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast. He is widely known for leadership teaching that focuses on practical clarity, personal discipline, healthy organisational culture, and the risks leaders create when performance, pace, or complexity start to outrun purpose. In this article’s context, he is particularly helpful on the idea that leaders become bottlenecks not only through control, but through over functioning, and that the goal of leadership is not to solve every problem, but to develop problem solvers.
Dr Henry Cloud
Dr Henry Cloud is a psychologist, leadership advisor, and author whose work focuses on healthy boundaries, responsibility, and organisational functioning. He is best known for translating psychological insight into practical frameworks that help leaders build strong cultures without enabling dysfunction. In leadership contexts, his contribution is clarifying what a leader should carry, what should be carried by others, and how leaders can be both supportive and appropriately demanding, so that growth is not replaced by rescue.
Dr John Townsend
Dr John Townsend is a psychologist, leadership coach, and co author of Boundaries alongside Dr Henry Cloud. His work focuses on responsibility, relational health, and the habits that build mature people and healthy organisations. In leadership contexts, his contribution complements Cloud’s by emphasising personal ownership, clear limits, and the importance of allowing people to experience appropriate consequence and challenge, because those experiences form judgement, resilience, and capability.
LEADER’S GUIDE
A Leader’s Discussion Guide has been created to help teams move beyond reading and into disciplined leadership conversation. It is designed to be used with this article as a shared reference point, creating space for clarity, challenge, and alignment.
The guide is intentionally short and practical. It can be used at the beginning of a team meeting or as a standalone leadership development conversation, and works best when the article is read in advance with the expectation of discussion.
In my experience, it is these regular, thoughtful leadership conversations that build real organisational capacity. They create shared language, surface assumptions, and strengthen alignment. More importantly, they signal that leadership growth is not optional or peripheral, but central to the work.
When leaders grow in clarity, judgement, and discipline, the impact extends well beyond the leadership team. It shapes culture, decisions, and outcomes across the organisation.
You can download the Leader’s Discussion Guide by submitting the form below.
