Talk it through with Aurelius
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Aurelius · Work & Leadership
Knowledge + Guidance

I'm great in a crisis — so why does that worry me?

You are good at this. Say that plainly and move on. The real question is what your competence costs the people around you, and what it lets them avoid learning. Every time you solve it alone, you prove the system needs you. That feels like value. It is also a trap you built with your own hands. If you are the only one who can find the root cause fast, the team has not gotten stronger — it has gotten dependent. You cannot control when the next incident hits. You can control whether you walk out of this one having made yourself slightly less necessary than you walked in.

◆ How this problem reads on the two dials
GuidanceKnowledge
More coaching
A little to learn
1:1 with AureliusWith others (a Pod)
Mostly you & the coach
A little with peers
The person already has the technical skill; what they lack is a practice for converting solo competence into shared capability, which is a behavior change, not new information.
How the two dials adapt to you →
What’s really going on

Because the skill that makes you valuable can also make you a bottleneck. Calm under fire is not the problem. Being the only one who can restore it is. Choose, in your next incident, to teach the fix instead of only doing it.

🔒 What you’ll build togetherUnlock by starting
A moveBefore you touch the next incident, name one person who will watch you work and take the next one alone.
A moveIn the retro, ask out loud: 'What would have happened if I were not here?' Write down the honest answer.
A moveCount how many open incidents only you can close. Pick one this month and hand it to someone else, fully.
A moveRefuse to get paged for anything already covered by a written runbook. Let the process hold or fail without you.
A moveWrite the root cause report only when no one else can. Otherwise, hand the pen away and review, don't author.

What changes unlock by starting

  • Fewer incidents require your direct hand to close.
  • At least one teammate can run root cause analysis without you in the room.
  • You can be offline during an incident without the team stalling.
  • Your calm becomes something the team does, not something only you supply.

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