Avoiding the "Therapist" Trap as a Tech Lead

Anemari Fiser names a trap she says most Tech Leads fall into: taking on every team problem as their own. “How can I help?” turns into “I’ll do it for you,” and what starts from good intentions becomes over-involvement that drains the leader and leaves the team dependent. She grounds the argument in her own early-career mistake. A team member struggled with paperwork after moving cities, and she jumped in, researched the process, skipped standups to accompany him to appointments. It didn’t go as promised. He grew frustrated that she hadn’t fixed it, she was overwhelmed and her own work suffered, and a colleague’s blunt question (“Why are you trying to fix this? It’s not your problem.”) is what made her step back.

The cost she lays out goes beyond one bad outcome: constant over-involvement burns leaders out, breeds resentment toward the team, stakeholders and themselves, and makes the leader the automatic point of blame when something goes wrong instead of distributing accountability across the team.

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• The trap starts from a good impulse (wanting to help) but the pattern to watch is the shift from “how can I help?” to “I’ll do it for you”. The second one removes the team member’s ownership.
• Fiser’s own story: she took over a colleague’s relocation paperwork, including skipping standups to attend appointments with him; the relationship soured when the process hit roadblocks and he blamed her for not delivering what she’d implicitly promised.
• Three costs of chronic over-involvement: burnout from carrying tasks that belong to the team, resentment (toward the team for not stepping up, toward stakeholders, toward yourself for not setting limits), and becoming the default point of blame when the fixer model positions the leader as the only one accountable.
• Boundary-setting questions she recommends asking before stepping into a problem: is this actually my problem to solve, what happens if I say no, and how can I guide without taking over.
• Self-check practice: periodically ask which people or tasks are draining disproportionate energy, and whether you’re stepping in where you should be encouraging ownership instead. She suggests a mentor or coach as an outside check on this blind spot.
• Concrete shift in how to support without fixing: when someone says they can’t deal with a task, prompt them to brainstorm a solution rather than take it over; for interpersonal conflict, offer to support the conversation (“I expect you to work it out together”) instead of mediating it yourself.