Dealers and Users

I was working with the C-team at a financial services firm when the founder* said something that stopped the room.

I think we’ve been drug dealers.

He wasn’t being dramatic. He was naming a pattern they’d finally seen clearly.

For years, this team had prided themselves on being available, responsive, decisive. When advisors got stuck, the senior team provided answers; when vendors or partners made demands, those were sent straight to the top.

It all had worked when things were just variable, unclear, complicated, adverse.

But now they were in Super-VUCA conditions: Volatility escalating into Volcanic eruptions, Uncertainty that felt Unknowable, Complexity tipping into Chaos, Ambiguity triggering Adversarial stands.

The firm had grown in a hurry, added lines of business, switched back-end processors, and wanted to expand their charitable work. They had outpaced their capacity to absorb and adapt. And now they were drowning — not because their people were incapable, but because an entire organization had learned to wait for the next fix and gripe when it didn’t come.

To ease the pain, the senior team had been dealing DOPE. And their people had gotten hooked.

The Setup

Here’s what followers actually need from leaders. Ron Heifetz at Harvard called them the services of authority. Eric Martin distilled them to four questions:

1. Direction: Where are we headed?
2. Order: How will we work together?
3. Protection: How will we stay safe?
4. Expertise: What does success look like?

DOPE. These aren’t nice-to-haves. They’re legitimate needs. When the terrain is familiar and challenges are technical, providing a dose of DOPE is exactly what good leadership looks like. Define the problem. Establish the process. Shield the team from distraction. Bring your know-how to bear.

The trouble starts in Super-VUCA churn when folks are jonesing for the next fix and we keep dealing the same supply. Direction becomes dictation. Order becomes control. Protection becomes insulation from reality. Expertise becomes “I’ll handle it.”

And followers? They learn that someone else will carry the weight. They wait for answers instead of wrestling with questions. They trade their agency for relief.

No one planned this. No one’s the villain. This is just how humans cope when Super-VUCA overwhelms our capacity to respond and all we can do is react.

>> Followers want to be comfortable. Leaders want to be indispensable. <<

Both sides are trying to meet real needs. Both sides end up addicted.

The Drama Underneath

If you’ve read my pieces on the Drama Triangle, you’ll recognize the pattern.

Leaders who over-function as DOPE dealers are playing Rescuer. They step in and solve. It feels generous, necessary. But it sends an unspoken message: You can’t handle this without me.

Followers who’ve learned to wait for next dose are in Victimhood. Not weak — disempowered. They’ve been trained that the system rewards dependency. Why struggle with a problem when someone upstream will resolve it?

Here’s where it gets painful. When the fixes stop working, when leaders burn out or the situation outpaces their supply of comfort, both sides flip. The Rescuer feels unappreciated and becomes Persecutor: After everything I’ve done for you. The Victim feels abandoned and becomes Persecutor right back: You set us up to fail.

Folks get hooked on the hard stuff, hopium, the false optimism that a few more technical fixes will keep working. Cheerleading substitutes for capacity-building. A push for more skills, seasoned with a dash of AI, will get them through unknown terrain if they just trek harder.

Here's the deal

What people resist is not change itself, but loss.

Leaders resist losing indispensability. Followers resist losing comfort. And hopium lets everyone pretend the loss isn’t coming.

The Flip

There’s another way to provide DOPE. Not dealing — dispensing. Not creating dependency — growing people’s ability to create new ways of seeing and thinking, feeling and sensing, doing and being, showing up and hanging in.

Heifetz puts it starkly: real leadership means

“disappointing your own people at a tolerable pace, for a purpose.”

That’s not cruelty; it’s respect. It’s trusting them with reality instead of protecting them from it.

Dealing → Dispensing

• “I’ll tell you where we’re going” → “What are we really here for?”
• “Here’s how it needs to be done” → “What do we need from each other?”
• “I’ll handle the hard stuff” → “What values will guide us through?”
• “I know what success looks like” → “How can we deploy your strengths?”

Otto Scharmer says leading today requires

“accessing our own not knowing, discomfort, and non-reaction.”

That’s the opposite of hopium. And it starts with our inner work — metabolizing stress for something wiser to emerge.

This is the shift from Drama to Empowerment. Instead of Rescuers, leaders become Coaches, walking alongside, but not taking over. Instead of Victims, followers become Creators, owning their contribution, bringing solutions. And Persecutor? That energy transforms into Challenger, providing productive friction that helps teams see blind spots and grow.

Same DOPE. Different delivery. Entirely different outcome.

The Real Work

I watched this transformation happen in real time, over time. Once they named the dynamic, they couldn’t unsee it. Partners started catching themselves mid-rescue. They learned to ask, “whose work is this?” before jumping in. They could sit with the discomfort of allowing people to discover their own solutions.

It wasn’t fast or easy. Old patterns have deep roots. But over eighteen months, something shifted. Advisors started bringing solutions instead of problems. The leadership team stopped drowning. The firm didn’t just survive the complexity — they learned to move within it.

I’ve seen the same shift with executive directors of nonprofits who’d been carrying their organizations on their backs. The ones who’d made themselves indispensable and were exhausted by it. The work wasn’t to make them better dealers. It was to help them see that their over-functioning was creating under-functioning everywhere else.

We cannot lead others well until we can lead ourselves well. And leading ourselves well means knowing when our ‘help’ isn’t helping. It means building our resilience with the anxiety of letting others grow. It means breaking the Drama cycle.

The Invitation

Here’s what I know: we can make ‘shift happen.’

Not through blame or shame, rather, by honest recognition of how we got here and a commitment to something different.

Great leaders owe their success to great followers. Great followers succeed when great leaders give the work back to them at a rate they can handle. Both sides start by leading themselves well. They start seeing their own patterns, interrupting their own reactivity, building their own capacity to evolve through Super-VUCA.

The ultimate test of leadership is the quality of the followers. Not their compliance — their capability. Not their comfort — their growth.

You can flip these scripts. You can create work cultures where leadership is shared in service of purposes greater than any one person.

Three questions to sit with:

• Where are you dealing DOPE in ways that create dependency?
• Where are you using, waiting for someone else to provide what you could develop for yourself or lashing out in frustration?
• What would it look like to dispense instead of deal?

Two experiments for this week:

• When someone brings you a problem, ask “What have you tried?” before offering solutions. Stay in the question longer than is comfortable.
• Notice when you’re about to rescue. Pause. Breathe. Reframe the issue. Ask yourself: over the long haul, whose work is this, really?

One practice:

• Before you step in, ask: Am I building capacity or creating dependency?

*This success case story represents various senior teams who've worked through major organizational changes. Details changed to protect confidentiality, but the patterns and breakthrough results are real.

Worth Reading:

• The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky
• Your Leadership Moment, Eric Martin
• Theory U, Otto Sharmer
• Three Vital Questions, David Womeldorff Emerald (Drama to Empowerment)

If you’re a leader who’s exhausted from carrying it all, or you’re ready to build a team that doesn’t need you to have every answer — that’s the work I do. Let’s talk.

Chris Thyberg: Founder, The Serving Way ... thinking partner | outfitter | coach

email: Chris.Thyberg@TheServingWay.com

scheduler: Calendly.com/The_Serving_Way

lead yourself well … serve your great purpose