“I’m a Fixer, and That Was Dangerous”: The hidden cost of the pattern most Educational Leaders never get to name

One Educational Leader inside the Dandelion cohort put it more plainly than any textbook could.

“When I was talking to all the educational leaders, they’re fixers, they’re people pleasers and fixes. So, I think, it becomes very dangerous because they become very, very overloaded.”

That word, dangerous, is worth sitting with. It is not a word she reached for casually. She was describing a pattern she recognised in herself and in the leaders around her, and she was naming the point at which the pattern stops being helpful and starts costing the person holding the role.

There is a version of the Educational Leader role that looks, from the outside, like everything is running smoothly. Questions arrive and get answered. Concerns surface and get resolved. Small fires appear and get handled before they travel anywhere. The person in the role looks capable, responsive, generous. Staff feel supported. The director feels the role is being held. The leader herself often feels, at the end of the week, that she has done what the role required of her.

Underneath that version, something else is happening. The role has become an endless series of small rescues. And the rescues are not free.

THE PLUMBER AND THE POET

The same leader described this internal tension using a distinction she had been reading about.

“There’s managers and there’s leaders, and I like to think of myself as someone who thinks outside the box and empowers people to do their job, but, in the moment when I’m overwhelmed, I’m absolutely a plumber who micromanages.”

That single sentence holds the whole pattern. In theory, she leads the way she values. In practice, when the day piles up, she defaults to fixing. She picks up the wrench. She solves what is in front of her, often in a way that is quicker than coaching someone through it. And because she is skilled and experienced, her fixes work.

What the fix does not do is build the capacity of the person who brought her the problem. It trains them to come back with the next one. And the next one. The role narrows into a queue of rescues, and the leader becomes the bottleneck for her own team’s growth.

WHY FIXING FEELS LIKE THE RESPONSIBLE CHOICE

From the inside, fixing rarely announces itself as the wrong move. It announces itself as the kind thing to do. The staff member in front of you is already stretched. Walking them through the thinking would take forty minutes. Solving it yourself takes four. The child is in the room. The parent is at the door. The roster is short. You do the maths and you fix it, because the fix is the one option that works before the next thing lands on your plate.

This is the loop Dandelion participants have been working to see from the outside. Fixing is usually a decision made under pressure, inside a role that has more demands than time, by someone who genuinely cares about the person they are fixing it for. It is not a character flaw. It is a logical response to the conditions the role is usually held under.

The difficulty is that the logic does not hold up over a term. Every fix that bypasses the other person’s thinking is a missed moment of development. Every fix that lands back on the leader’s desk adds to the load she is already carrying. And because the pattern is invisible, nobody can intervene on her behalf. She is the only person who sees the full queue.

BECOMING A DUMPING GROUND

There is a second risk in the fixer pattern, and the same participant named it plainly.

“It was more of a concern that we’d become a dumping ground, and it becomes a therapy session.”

The leaders in the cohort have been working with a different kind of listening, one that is present rather than directive, that lets the person speak before the problem is solved. What they have noticed is that without a clear structure, the openness can tip into something else. Staff begin to arrive with emotional offloads rather than questions. Conversations stretch. The leader’s role blurs with something closer to counselling, and the accountability loop the leader was hoping to strengthen weakens instead.

The mentor leading the cohort was direct about where this line sits. Mentoring, in the frame the program uses, is “not around performance management, supervision, fixing, therapy, or lengthy conversations.” Naming what it is not turns out to be almost as important as naming what it is. The role is a specific piece of work with specific edges, and holding those edges is part of what keeps the role sustainable.

WHEN FIXING STOPS BEING THE DEFAULT

What participants describe, after sitting with this pattern for a few months, is a subtle reshaping of how they engage. Staff still arrive with questions. The leader still has the same expertise. The difference is a pause before the answer, a question instead of a fix, a small structure that hands the thinking back to the person who brought it in. That pause costs a few minutes in the moment. It saves the same conversation from returning next week.

One participant described the realisation as a shift in identity rather than technique. She had always assumed mentoring meant being useful, and being useful meant solving. Sitting inside a cohort where the pattern was named out loud gave her permission to hold the role differently. As she put it in one of the sessions, she had assumed “mentoring’s all about fixing things,” and realised, sitting in the room, that it was not.

That realisation lands differently for different leaders. For some it is a relief. For others it is uncomfortable, because it asks them to let conversations sit in a less resolved place than they are used to. For almost all of them, it changes what the end of the day feels like.

WHY THIS PATTERN IS WORTH NAMING

If you are in the Educational Leader role and you recognise yourself in this, the pattern is not a failing. It is the predictable result of carrying a role that asks for fast responses inside an environment that rarely slows down. The fixer reflex is how most leaders keep the day running.

The work is not to stop caring, or to stop being useful. The work is to notice the moment fixing starts eroding the capacity of the team you are trying to build, and to choose a different move. That small choice, made over and over, is what changes the shape of the role.

ABOUT THE DANDELION PROGRAM

The Dandelion Program is a ten-month cohort for Educational Leaders, with mentoring, peer learning, and frameworks for holding the role without collapsing into rescue.

Learn more about the program