Codependent Leaders: Undermining Engagement & Performance

In a blog written in October of 2022, I shared the negative impacts to business growth in having a codependent business. This edition is going to delve deeper into codependency at the leadership and management level within an organization. While leadership should ideally empower, engage, and inspire team members to do their best work, when a leader is codependent, performance, productivity, and engagement within the corporate culture is hampered.

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A codependent leader is one who relies too heavily on a team member or the overall team to the detriment of their own or their team members’ advancement. Additionally, being a codependent leader can negatively impact the business or department’s efficiency and optimal performance.

How does codependency happen? According to a study published in the National Library of Medicine, insecurity as a leader plays a role in creating either avoidance or anxiety attachments of codependency. Narcissism is also associated with a codependent leader who is all about control and manipulation of team members. Consider if any of these scenarios are showing up in the leaders within your business.

1. Holding People Back: I am a proponent of strengths-based team engagement and leadership. If you have hired people smarter than you and more competent in certain areas than you as their leader, kudos to you! Henry Ford was once quoted as saying hiring people smarter than you is key if you want to effectively grow and build the company beyond you. Codependency occurs when what key people on your team know is so critical to your success as a leader, that you hold them back from advancing and gaining opportunities through their contributions. This typically happens when the leader takes credit for these key team members’ brilliance instead of lifting up and recognizing the team as key contributors to desired outcomes. Eventually you will lose these people. A leader with the confidence to admit what they don’t know and give kudos to those who do know is a leader who can be trusted, admired and respected.

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Momentum Building Decision #25
If you are too dependent on the outcome, 
you haven’t considered your options.

2. Micromanaging Everything: In our CURx2 corporate culture assessment a statement that is often checked that is occurring in micromanaging cultures is “Management is highly visible and engaged with employees on a day-to-day basis.” This is typically coupled with a statement that “The manager to whom I report dictates what I do in my job and what my priorities should be to be successful.” If you don’t allow a team member to think for themselves, you are holding them and your business back. A codependent leader can be an incessant micromanager, needing to know everything that is happening and dictating every move a team member makes. Their codependency is all about being in control and not losing control. There is a level of distrust that is imminent in this codependent leader. They believe they can only count on themselves so must manage everyone and everything to their complete satisfaction. 

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Momentum Building Decision #27
Whatever is out of your comfort zone is a learning experience.

3. Not Knowing Simple Answers: When you rely on one person too heavily for certain things to the point that no one can replace them or you believe they are the only ones who can do it, you are a codependent leader. I recall witnessing this firsthand while lobbying for small business on Capitol Hill. I would meet with legislators and witness them look over to their chief of staff regarding their stance on a particular issue or initiative or the status of a particular bill. I sat there in disbelief as an elected official could not answer a simple question and was so dependent on their chief of staff or staff members to tell them what they were supposed to say. Once I witnessed this, I realized who was the essential person to engage with, and it was not the elected official. A key success factor in a leader who is not codependent is that they know how important cross training team members is to ensure no one is so essential that everything pauses or stops until they can be re-engaged. There is always someone who can pick up the slack in any given situation. 

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Bottom Line Rule #18
Training should be an ongoing quality 
control and value enhancing initiative.

4. Costs Too Much to Replace: When a leader has someone in their employ that does some things exceptionally well and other things not so well, and they keep them due to a belief it will cost too much to replace them, there is a problem. I think back to a CEO who for the longest time kept a high performing toxic sales manager on board due to his results garnered, until finally the toxicity was too much to bear. Then after letting go of this “high performer,” the entire department seemed to be unleashed with a level of performance he had not seen before. Why? Because the “high performer” was holding everyone else back, and then he was gone. That CEO saw a 200% increase in productivity once he stopped “depending” on someone who wasn’t as high performing as he had previously thought. 

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Bottom Line Rule #12
Always have a back-up plan.

5. Expect 24/7 access: I immediately think of the movie “The Devil Wears Prada” where Andrea must be at Miranda’s beckoned call no matter what time of the day or night when I think of the codependent leader that must have 24/7 access. This is a codependent leader on steroids. Needing to have so much control over a direct report’s time that they could care less about life beyond work is a leader who believes the entire world revolves around them. 

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As a leader in your business, the key to success is to help others lead themselves and leverage their responsibilities in ways that catapult the business forward. Instead of holding your people back, empower them to excel. Instead of making it all about you, make it all about them and how their skills and abilities are exactly what the business needs to realize levels it has not experienced before. 

Yours in economic vitality,

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Sherré L. DeMao, CGS is author of Dream Wide Awake, 50 Secrets of Growth Companies in Down Economic Times, and Me, Myself & Inc. – a Synergized World, An Energized Business, Living Your Ultimate Life, and the CEO/founder of BizGrowth Inc. an award-winning next-level strategy, training, and intellectual property development firm based in Denver, NC, serving clients across the United States. As a Forbes Council expert and thought leader since 2022, her blog seeks to help entrepreneurs build businesses with economic value, worth and preference in their industries and marketplaces. ​