The [un]common stuff that lives between strategy and execution, that teams don’t talk about.
Your first read every Wednesday morning, meant to be applied and forwarded.
Across everyone who completed our S.P.A.R.K. Assessment in 2025, we pulled the 242 with leadership titles, from the C-suite through to frontline management. Three strong patterns showed up:
→ 84% defaulted to a flexible working style
→ 70% stopped their own work to help others on their team
→ 65% felt guilty saying no and started reconsidering
When we pulled the data, I expected senior leaders to look different from newer managers. My initial hypothesis was that more experience and more authority would make people more comfortable drawing lines around their time and deciding which requests genuinely needed them.
That's not what we found. The instinct to be helpful, accommodating and endlessly capable followed leaders all the way up the leadership ladder.
That tracks when you think about what strong leaders get rewarded for. You became the person who could handle more, find the answer, step in when something stalled and absorb the pressure so no one else had to feel it. Those behaviours earned you trust and moved you into leadership, however, the same behaviours start working against you as your responsibilities grow.
This is what's called 'Citizenship Fatigue'
When you stop your own work to solve someone else's problem, the immediate result looks good. Over time, your team learns that coming to you is the fastest route to clarity. You'll help them think it through, catch what they missed or take something off their plate when they are stretched.
Eventually you become their personal version of ChatGPT: always on, full of answers and much faster than working it out themselves.
This is where flexibility stops being a leadership style and becomes part of the team's operating model. They plan around the assumption (conscious or not) that you will clarify the vague request, make the hard call, remember the missing context or step in as the deadline closes. You experience that as exhaustion; everyone else experiences it as the work getting done. That's one reason it survives for so long. What you are feeling has been studied, and it has a name.
Mark Bolino and his colleagues coined the term citizenship fatigue (2015), the specific tiredness that comes from being the person who always steps in to help.
The part that matters for you is the threshold. At low and moderate levels, helping others actually lowers your exhaustion. It feels good, it builds relationships, it's part of what makes the work meaningful.
Once the helping outruns the capacity you have to give, that same behaviour flips and starts driving the exhaustion instead. Same instinct, opposite result, and the only thing that moved was the volume.
So the goal was never to become less helpful. It is to get more deliberate about what your help is producing, and to notice when you have crossed from the version that fills you up to the version that empties you out.
Here's how you can counter this phenomenon
The next time someone comes to you with the same kind of question, look past the immediate task and ask what your availability is actually compensating for.
It may be covering an expectation that was never made clear.
- A decision they do not realize they are allowed to make.
- A skill they have not built yet.
- A process that still lives mostly in your head.
- Or a confidence issue that sends them looking for reassurance before they move.
Each one needs a different response:
→ Lacks clarity → name the outcome, the constraints and how the call gets made
→ Lacks skill → coach them and give them room to practice
→ Lacks confidence → confirm they're allowed to (and are expected to) decide, even if they don't decide exactly as you would
Taking over solves all three for the afternoon and removes none of them long-term.
Change what people have to bring you
Once you can see where the dependency is forming, you can change the way problems arrive at your desk. Don't think of this as being 'less helpful/available or more rigid.' Think of it as asking people to stay in the thinking instead of handing you the whole problem.
When someone brings you an issue, ask them to come with:
→ What they think is happening
→ What they've already tried
→ What they recommend doing next
→ What decision or support they actually need from you
At first this feels slower than just giving them the answer, and you probably can solve most of these faster than the person in front of you. The real question is whether being faster today is worth being necessary every single time the problem comes back.
Instead of absorbing the problem, you help them build the judgment they will need the next time it shows up.
Chances are, your exhaustion isn't a time-management problem at all. It may be a sign that too much of the team's day-to-day has been built around access to you.
If you're curious where you sit on the flexibility scale, take our S.P.A.R.K. Assessment here and reply to this email with the word Flexible. I'll send you your full S.P.A.R.K. Report ($175 value) at no cost.
Until next week,
Kendra
Research reference: Bolino, Hsiung, Harvey & LePine (2015), "'Well, I'm tired of tryin'!' Organizational citizenship behaviour and citizenship fatigue," Journal of Applied Psychology.
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