The Skills You Optimized For Are Now Your Bottleneck

You spent 15 years becoming the person who gets called when things break. The hard problems. The urgent fires. The “only you can solve this” emergencies. You got fast at heroics. Then you became a leader, and heroics became your liability.

How “Give It to Sarah” Creates Capability Gaps

The most challenging technical work consistently goes to those perceived as the most capable programmers. The motivation seems rational—maximize productivity by assigning complex problems to people who can solve them quickly.

The unseen effect is systemic.

When Sarah always gets the hard problems, three things happen simultaneously. 

1. Sarah develops increasingly specialized expertise. 
2. The rest of the team works on simpler problems that don’t stretch their capabilities.
3. The gap between Sarah’s skills and everyone else’s widens, confirming the initial assessment that only Sarah can handle complexity.

This isn’t malicious. It’s an emergent property of reasonable local decisions. Every manager thinks: “This is urgent, we need it done right, give it to the person who can deliver.” Every time, that decision makes sense. Cumulatively, those decisions create a skills gap that becomes structural.

The organization now has a dependency it doesn’t recognize as a dependency. Until something happens.

When Life Happens to Your Key Technical Resource

You were promoted to CTO because you were Sarah. The person who could solve anything. The technical depth everyone relied on. Then you moved into leadership, focused on strategy and team development, and life happened to your backup.

Maybe they left the company. Maybe pregnancy, family bereavement, long-term illness. Maybe they’re just unavailable when a critical issue emerges. Suddenly there’s a technical skill gap, and you—the newly minted CTO—are back to firefighting because nobody else developed those capabilities while you were the one handling everything.

This is the moment many technical leaders realize the skills that made them successful individual contributors are now bottlenecks. You optimized for personal technical velocity. You became exceptionally fast at solving complex problems yourself. The organization rewarded this by giving you leadership responsibility.

But leadership isn’t “solve harder problems faster.” It’s “enable others to solve problems without you.” And you never learned that skill because you were too busy being the hero.

Why Being Helpful Perpetuates the Problem

The pattern doesn’t end when you become a leader. Most technical leaders continue doing what they were taught—assign complex work to the most capable people. It feels efficient. It feels like good resource allocation.

What it actually does is perpetuate the cycle that created your own capability gap.

When you jump in to solve technical problems yourself, it feels productive. Watching someone struggle with something you could fix in minutes feels wasteful. But every time you solve it instead of coaching them through it, you’ve confirmed that they can’t do it without you. You’ve created another dependency.

The same dynamic plays out when you consistently assign stretch problems only to your senior developers. They get faster and more capable. Your mid-level developers work on well-defined tasks that don’t challenge them. The gap widens. And when your senior developer leaves, you discover you’ve built a team that can’t operate without them.

I’ve seen this pattern clearly in one client engagement. Brought in initially to address technical debt, I observed the CTO’s assignment patterns during calm periods—complex features always went to the same two senior developers. When I explained what I was seeing, she recognized it immediately. She had been Sarah. She knew the cost of that pattern. And she was unconsciously recreating it in her own team.

She started intervening deliberately during periods of calm, cycling complex assignments to developers who hadn’t tackled that level of challenge before. Not during fires—during the stable periods when there was capacity to coach someone through struggle. The result wasn’t just broader capability distribution. It was reduced dependency on specific individuals and faster resolution when issues emerged because more people understood the complex parts of the system.

Breaking the Cycle Requires Deliberate Practice

Stopping the pattern requires recognizing that capability development is not a side effect of work—it’s a measured outcome that requires intentional effort.

This means assigning stretch problems to developing team members during calm periods, not just when your seniors are unavailable. It means coaching through problems instead of solving them, even when solving them yourself would be faster. It means measuring how widely critical capabilities are distributed across your team, not just how quickly work gets completed.

It also means recognizing when you’re jumping in to be helpful and asking whether you’re actually creating a dependency. Every time you solve a problem someone else could learn to solve, you’re optimizing for short-term velocity at the cost of long-term capability.

The challenge is that you can’t see these patterns clearly from inside them. You don’t notice when “being helpful” becomes “creating dependencies.” You don’t recognize when your speed is masking skills gaps. You don’t realize you’ve become a bottleneck until the crisis arrives and you’re the only one who can respond.

This is where external perspective creates tangible ROI. A coach observes your assignment patterns, identifies the dependencies you’re creating, and helps you see the ways your technical strengths are now working against organizational capability. Not because you’re doing something wrong—because you’re optimizing for the wrong outcomes without realizing it.

The skills that made you a successful individual contributor—being fast, being reliable, being the person who solves hard problems—are real strengths. They’re also the patterns that prevent others from developing those same capabilities. Leadership isn’t about abandoning those skills. It’s about knowing when to deploy them and when to step back so others can grow.

You spent years optimizing to be the go-to technical problem solver. That optimization served you well. Now the question is: are you building a team that can operate without you, or are you recreating the dependency trap you once experienced yourself?

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While the principles discussed here are straightforward, their effective implementation often requires a nuanced understanding of your team’s unique context and your own blind spots. That’s where evidence-based coaching makes the difference, helping you identify the patterns you can’t see from inside them—the ways your helpfulness creates dependencies, the skills gaps your speed masks, the bottlenecks you’ve accidentally become. Let’s explore how tailored coaching can help you build distributed capability instead of concentrated dependencies. Reach out today, and let’s transform your technical strengths from bottlenecks into leverage for your entire team.