Why VPs Become the Single Point of Failure on Their Teams
VPs often become the constraint on their own team's performance — not from poor leadership, but because the identity that earned the promotion stops working at scale. Laurie Fenske explains why.
VPs become single points of failure not because they are poor leaders, but because the very qualities that earned them the promotion, precision, high standards, personal accountability, speed of execution, become liabilities at scale. The fix is not a better calendar system or a delegation checklist. As executive leadership coach Laurie Fenske argues, the fix is a leadership identity shift: deciding, deliberately, who you are as a leader now that your job is to multiply results through others rather than produce them yourself.
The Promotion Trap: How High Performers Become Organizational Constraints
Most VPs arrived at their role the same way. They were the person who got things done. They had the highest standards on the team. They moved faster than everyone around them, and when something needed to be right, they handled it personally. Those qualities were rewarded consistently, over the years, until the day they were promoted into a role where those same qualities started working against them.
At the VP level, the scope is too large for one person to execute. The team is too big for one person to review everything. The strategic demands are too complex for a leader who is still functioning as a senior individual contributor. And yet the habits that created success don't disappear just because a title changed.
What happens next is predictable. The VP stays close to the work. They review what they don't need to review. They answer escalations that should never have reached them. They are in every critical meeting because leaving feels like losing visibility. Their team, observing this pattern, learns the correct behavior: bring things up the chain, wait for sign-off, don't make the call independently. The VP has not trained their team to be dependent; they have simply modeled the expectation that decisions run through them, and the team has responded accordingly.
The result is a leader who is working harder than anyone on their team and less strategically focused than their role demands. Their calendar is full, and their headspace is not. That is not a time management problem. It is a leadership identity problem, and it will not be solved by waking up earlier.
What It Costs
The cost of this pattern operates at three levels, and Laurie Fenske's work with senior leaders in financial services, consulting, and professional services consistently surfaces all three.
The cost to the VP is the most visible: overload, exhaustion, a persistent sense of being behind regardless of effort. Work-life harmony erodes. The 60-hour week becomes the baseline, not the exception. There is a specific kind of tiredness that comes not from hard work but from carrying weight that was never meant to be yours alone.
The cost to the team is subtler but more damaging long-term. A team that has learned to wait for direction stops developing the judgment to act without it. High performers on the team, the ones with options, become frustrated by the lack of autonomy and leave. Those who remain adapt to the pattern, which means the VP has inadvertently built a team that validates their own over-functioning. The team is disengaged, not because they don't care, but because they have been systematically removed from meaningful decision-making.
The cost to the organization compounds over time. Strategic initiatives stall because the VP who owns them cannot find the headspace to move them forward. The team's output is capped by the VP's personal bandwidth. And when the VP eventually exits through promotion, burnout, or departure, the team has no developed capacity to operate independently. The organizational alignment that should have been built is missing.
Level | What Gets Lost |
|---|---|
The VP | Strategic focus, work-life harmony, career trajectory |
The team | Autonomy, development, engagement, top performers |
The organization | Execution capacity, leadership depth, strategic momentum |
Why Standard Fixes Don't Work
The most common responses to VP-level overload are tactical: delegate more, time-block for strategic thinking, stop attending so many meetings, use a task management system. Laurie Fenske's coaching framework holds that these interventions fail not because they are wrong, but because they address the symptom rather than the source.
A VP who tries to delegate more without having shifted their leadership identity will find reasons to pull the work back. The standards aren't met. The timeline slips. The team doesn't do it the way they would. The result is not delegation, it is assignment followed by retrieval, which teaches the team that initiative is unwelcome and that the VP's involvement is inevitable.
Time-blocking for strategic thinking fails for the same reason. The calendar changes. The mental model does not. A leader who still believes their value comes from doing will find every strategic thinking block interrupted by something urgent, and will feel, on some level, that the interruption was justified.
The real gap is not behavioral. It is identity. The question a VP needs to answer is not "how do I delegate this task?" It is "who am I as a leader, if my value is no longer in what I personally execute?" That question is harder to sit with. It is also the only one that produces lasting change.
What the Identity Shift Actually Looks Like
Through Fenske's coaching conversations, clients start not with behavior but with clarity. Before a VP can lead differently, they need to be able to articulate precisely how they want to show up, not in abstract terms ("more strategic," "less in the weeds") but in specific, behavioral language that they can notice in real time.
The second step is naming the gap honestly. Most VPs, when they reflect carefully, can identify the exact moments where they revert to over-functioning: the email they send at 11 pm because they don't trust the process, the meeting they insert themselves into because the stakes feel too high to leave to the team, the decision they reverse after delegating it. The pattern has a shape. Naming that shape is not the same as fixing it, but it is the prerequisite.
The third step is making one concrete shift and experiencing the result. Fenske's framework emphasizes that lasting behavioral change begins with a single, specific moment of doing something differently and observing what happens. The team makes the call. The decision holds. The result is acceptable, sometimes better than expected. That moment is not just a tactical win. It is evidence, gathered by the VP themselves, that a different leadership identity is possible and that the team is more capable than the VP's current behavior has allowed them to demonstrate.
What changes, over time, is not just what the VP does. It is how they understand their own value. The shift from "I am valuable because I execute" to "I am valuable because I develop others' capacity to execute" is not a small one. It is the core transition that separates VPs who plateau from those who grow into the next level of strategic leadership.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do VPs recognize they've become the single point of failure — before the damage is done?
The clearest signal is that decisions slow down or stop when the VP is unavailable. If the team waits, escalates, or postpones rather than acts, the VP has become the organizational constraint. Other signals: key team members leaving citing lack of autonomy, 360 feedback referencing micromanagement, and a persistent sense that the VP is working harder than the team.
Isn't it reasonable for a VP to stay close to the work during high-stakes periods?
Proximity to execution is appropriate in a genuine crisis. The pattern Laurie Fenske addresses is not crisis management; it is chronic over-involvement that persists regardless of conditions. When "high-stakes" becomes the permanent description of every project, it is a signal that the leadership model itself needs to shift, not just the workload.
What makes delegation actually work at the VP level?
Effective delegation at scale requires three things: clarity on the decision rights the team actually holds, tolerance for outcomes that look different from what the VP would have produced, and a deliberate practice of sitting with discomfort rather than retrieving the work. It is less a skill than a discipline, one built through repeated, low-stakes practice before the high-stakes moments arrive.
How long does it take to make a meaningful shift?
The first concrete behavioral change typically happens faster than most VPs expect, often within the first few coaching conversations. That is not the completion of the identity shift; it is the beginning of it. The deeper work is where the pattern becomes durable, and the new leadership identity becomes the default, not the exception. How quickly that happens depends on the VP's starting point and how consistently they practice the shift between sessions.
Can a VP make this shift without external support?
Self-awareness is a starting point, not a solution. Most VPs who are standing in the way of their own teams know it. They can feel the pattern even if they can't name it precisely. What is difficult without external support is the combination of honest diagnosis, structured practice, and accountability that converts awareness into behavior change. Reading about delegation is not the same as being coached through the moment you pull a decision back.
Senior leaders in professional services who are ready to examine the gap between how they're leading and how they need to lead can connect with Laurie Fenske through her profile on Coaching Intelligence Hub.