Whose Job Was It To Fix This?

My old boss used to call me her FUF.

It stood for something a lot less polite than "fixer," but that's essentially what it meant: the person who got called in when something had gone wrong and needed sorting, fast.

I decided it was basically a promotion.

(Sidebar: in case of any doubt, yes, it means f-up fixer).

I used to wear it like a badge of honour. Being the one who could be trusted to sort out any mess felt like proof of my value, not just to her, but to myself. The more indispensable I became, the safer that felt. I said yes to things nobody had actually asked me to fix, then wondered why there was nothing left of me by Friday.

What I didn't notice for a long time was what it was costing me. I kept pushing, even on the days I was running on empty with nothing left to give. My identity had become so tied to being the one who fixes things that stopping felt like it would mean I wasn't worth as much. That pattern is part of what eventually drove me into burnout.

It's actually only fairly recently that I could see the distinction between what I was actually doing and what good leadership actually required. From the outside, they look almost identical.

Both involve stepping in.

Both come from caring about the outcome.

But they aren't the same instinct, and they don't produce the same result.

Fixing puts you in the middle of the problem.

Leading puts accountability where it belongs.

I still see this pattern constantly, now from the other side of it.

A client of mine has a reputation for being the person who jumps in. Whatever needs handling on her team, she's usually first to step forward, and everyone around her has come to expect it. If there were a support group for recovering fixers, I'm pretty sure she'd be running it before anyone gave her the chance to volunteer.

In a recent session, we started asking why. Something was clearly driving her to step in even when she logically knew it wasn't always the best option.

What we found wasn't a lack of trust in her team, but the belief that being useful means being the one who does something about it - the same belief I built my own career on.

That belief serves people well early on.

It builds a reputation.

It gets you noticed for exactly the right reasons at exactly the right time.

The trouble is that it doesn't update itself automatically once the role grows.

The behaviour that makes you indispensable in one job can work against you in the next one, because you're still measuring your value by how much you personally carry, rather than how well the people around you are equipped to carry it themselves.

Fixing feels responsible. It feels like care.

Stepping in when something is going wrong feels like doing the right thing, not avoidance. So the identity holds on, even once it's costing more than it's giving back.

Help, in this context, has a narrower definition than most of us give it.

Real help isn't always solving the problem in front of you. Sometimes it's making sure the problem lands with the person who's actually meant to own it, even when you're capable of handling it yourself.

What changes the pattern isn't trying harder to resist the urge to step in. It's asking a different question in the moment before you do:

is this actually mine to solve, or is my involvement the thing that's letting someone else avoid solving it?

For my client, that's meant practising a pause before she jumps into her team's decisions. For a recovering fixer, that's roughly as natural as running a marathon backwards.

None of this makes fixing wrong. There will always be moments that genuinely need you to step in directly. But if every difficult moment gets resolved the same way, it isn't leadership anymore. It's a bad habit that we've become so comfortable with that we don't see the problem with it anymore.

I wish someone had asked me that question years before my body eventually asked it for me.

Whose job was this, really? And did you just make it yours?