Published January 30, 2026 in Coaching Corner • 6 min read • 
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As a leader, you face complex and intricate challenges every day. At times it can be hard to pinpoint or even articulate these challenges. But until you can fully address and resolve them, they have the potential to stall your professional and personal growth, your career, and your team’s success. This is where professional coaching comes in.Frances is the director of marketing at a multinational pharmaceutical company. Dubbed “superwoman” by her colleagues, she is respected for being smart, competent, relentlessly driven, and an excellent executor. She is ambitious, and a recent company reorganization has raised serious hopes of a promotion. Talking to her manager, however, she is disappointed to learn that a position she’s been hoping for is to be filled by an external hire.
Daunted but not deterred, Frances schedules a follow-up meeting with her boss, hoping for a candid conversation about why she has been passed over. During this meeting, Frances receives dismaying feedback. While there is no doubt about her execution capabilities, the senior management team does not see her potential as a strategic leader. Frances disagrees. She feels unrecognized, believing that others may be taking credit for her achievements. But there’s more. Her boss shares the results of an engagement survey taken by her direct team. The survey has surfaced strong feelings of disengagement among team members. They report feeling disempowered and fatigued at work. At home, Frances’s family has begun showing their own signs of strain – missed dinners, school appointments, and short tempers feed into a sense of guilt and quiet resentment.
Frances begins to wonder if there is a pattern. It’s not the first time that she has been passed over for a strategic project or a promotion. Her standard response is to set higher standards for herself, to work harder, longer, and accomplish more. But the results stay the same: she remains at the same level within the organization, and her home life continues to suffer.
Frances feels enormously frustrated. There’s resentment toward her boss, who can’t seem to see her potential, and anger toward team members who are failing to keep pace with her drive and tempo. At the same time, she sees evidence of a vicious cycle in her own responses and behaviors.
If I take care of everyone, fix all the problems, everything will be OK and I will be worthy.
Frances decides to seek the help of an executive coach. Her question is simple: Why do I keep taking on more, even when more delivers less?
Listening to her story, the coach wonders if she might be trapped inside the “hero syndrome” – an instinctive need to consistently raise the bar, do more, achieve more, aim big, and “save the world”. This fits with the “superwoman” label Frances has earned from colleagues and brings to light some surprising insights.
The coach talks about overfunctioning – a tendency to take on more responsibility, control, or effort than is optimal, which often compensates for or results in other people’s underfunctioning. Unintentionally, overfunctioning unbalances the system by limiting the growth and ownership of other team members.
Frances and her coach trace the roots of this pattern to the birthplace of her leadership style. When she was eight, her mother fell seriously ill. Overnight, Frances had to step into the role of caretaker, tending to her mother’s needs and those of her siblings. She has learned to suppress her own feelings, equating being responsible with being loved and valued. This early narrative has become the blueprint of her leadership: “If I take care of everyone, fix all the problems, everything will be OK and I will be worthy.”
Frances begins to see the hidden cost of her “heroine” leadership style. Her constant “rescuing” has created dependency in others and led to underfunctioning and reduced engagement in her team. The more she does, the less they need to do. This creates resentment as team members lack a sense of motivation and empowerment. Frances, too, feels resentment. She feels that she does all the work while others take the credit or settle for mediocrity. Drowning in tasks, she lacks the time for effective stakeholder management, resulting in decreased visibility. This cycle has drained her energy, eroded her family life and sense of joy, and opened the door to burnout.
Now Frances realizes that if she dials down her engagement by 20–30%, she will gain time not only for coaching her team and managing stakeholders, but also for other parts of her life. She can work smarter, not harder. This is a breakthrough moment – Frances understands that she has a choice. She can continue to overfunction like Sisyphus, endlessly pushing the boulder uphill alone, or she can embrace a new image: an expedition sailboat, where she and her team travel toward their shared destination with collective effort and balance.
Frances learns to notice cues such as feelings of anxiety and heaviness, especially in her head, as if wearing a helmet or armor. These sensations signal that she is slipping into old patterns. When they appear, she can pause, reframe, and choose a different response.
As a natural superwoman, she is used to aiming high and moving fast. She now realizes she is often several steps ahead of her team. By breaking big goals into smaller milestones and celebrating micro-wins, she can help her team build confidence and enhance their connection.
Before saying yes or jumping into action, Frances can pause to ask herself: “Is this really my role?” and “Will this help others grow?” She introduces short pauses between meetings and moments of intensity to breathe, reflect, and reset, thereby shifting from “heroic doing” to human leading.
To ease performance pressure, Frances practices bringing curiosity and lightness into her work. Together with her coach, she visualizes the workplace not as a battlefield but as a playground. She pictures a seesaw, representing the balance of responsibility between herself and others – the fun and flow coming from taking turns going up and down.
Through coaching, Frances begins developing an inner radar to detect moments of overfunctioning and underfunctioning. The seesaw on the playground has become her inner game changer – a reminder to stay responsive when she notices herself tipping too far in either direction.
She even playfully identifies which part of her body was overfunctioning – head over heart. When her mind grows too loud, she gently places a hand on her heart and listens for its quieter wisdom; the inner voice that pushes her to constantly perform and achieve begins to soften.
This practice permeates her family life. She notices moments when she slips into “super mom” mode – overdoing and overcaring – or, at the other extreme, invisible. Instead of judging herself, she is learning to rebalance, like riding a seesaw, finding the middle ground of authentic presence and shared responsibility. Peace is returning to home base.
At work, Frances begins saying no to projects that her superwoman self would once have accepted without hesitation. She sets clearer boundaries and manages her time more intentionally, freeing energy to connect with her team – to listen, ask questions, train, and coach. A new rapport emerges: one built on mutual trust, growing autonomy, and genuine collaboration. Engagement begins to rise, as does a sense of shared ownership.
Perhaps most importantly, Frances has begun to let go of her anger and anxiety about promotions. She is finding joy in her work, her team, and culture. She is reconnecting with a deeper sense of purpose and feels relaxed about the future. She is fine where she is, balanced in her execution and more adept in managing herself, her team, and her peers. When the time is right, she is optimistic about seeing what opportunities arise.
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