From Wendy: What Leading a Group Practice Taught Me About Letting Go

From Wendy: What Leading a Group Practice Taught Me About Letting Go

I stepped out of a session and immediately looked at my phone. Waiting for me was a string of messages, all stacked up in the 50 minutes I’d been away from my computer. A scheduling conflict, a question about a new client’s insurance, a “just wanted to check with you before I…”

There wasn’t anything urgent, no fires to put out, but the list was long, so I did what I always did. I started working through them.

I used to think that this was just what it meant to run a group practice. People have questions, and as the leader, I was the one to answer them. I’d been doing it this way since it was just me and a few other therapists, and I never really stopped to ask whether that still made sense now that there were more.

I Thought Being Needed Was the Whole Point

For most of my career, being the person people came to for help felt like the whole point of my job. In sessions with clients, and then eventually when I started building a team, I was the steady presence that others could come to for help. 

If someone had a question, I wanted to be the one to answer it. If something was uncertain, I wanted to make the call. It felt like care. It felt like what a good leader does: showing up, staying available, and making sure things land on my shoulders instead of someone else’s.

That’s what it meant to be a good leader, or so I thought.

What It Cost

For a while, it worked, or at least it seemed to. My team knew they could come to me with anything big or small, and I liked being someone they could rely on. But somewhere along the way, coming to me stopped being a choice and started being the default. Even small decisions started routing through me first. I hadn’t asked anyone to do that, but it’d become a pattern I’d unknowingly built.

I felt it in the number of questions waiting for me at the end of the day, or in between client sessions. Being available for every little thing meant I was rarely able to be fully present for the bigger things that mattered more. It was starting to wear on me. It wasn’t sustainable. 

And I wasn’t the only one to carry the cost. My team was capable, but they were checking in with me because I’d made myself the person things went through. Instead of coming to their own conclusions or problem solving, they came to me and I did it for them.

I think about the clinicians who might have grown faster, trusted themselves sooner, felt more ownership over their work, if I hadn't been so quick to be the one with the answer.

When Things Changed

Once I noticed the habit, I started catching myself more.

Someone would come to me with something, and I’d notice the answer forming in my head before they’d even finished the question. It didn’t feel like being helpful anymore. It felt like a reflex that skipped right past whatever the other person might have worked out on their own.

So I started stepping back. Instead of jumping in with an answer right away, I paused. I started asking what they’d already tried, or what they thought would be the best way forward. More often than not, they had an answer. Often a different solution than what I’d already thought of, but a workable one. Sometimes, it was even better than what I’d thought of because they had context about the situation that I didn’t.

I knew my team could think for themselves, but it wasn’t until I stepped back and let them that I realized how much room I’d been taking up without meaning to.

What My Leadership Looks Like Now

Letting go isn’t about stepping back and just hoping that things work out. For me, it meant building a group practice that could hold some of what I’d been holding in my own head. That meant that trusting my team wasn’t just a mindset shift, but something my therapy practice could actually support.

That’s where group practice management started to mean something different to me. It became less about how many hats I was wearing and started being about what my team could see for themselves, manage without me, and follow through on without me needing to be in the middle of it.

Some of that came from being more intentional about what I actually needed to weigh in on vs. what I was weighing in on out of habit. After years of being the person people came to with questions, stepping back wasn’t always easy.

But the bigger shift came from having the right systems in place. When my team could access the same information that I could – who was waiting on what, where a client was in the intake process, when a scheduling conflict had an obvious answer that didn’t require checking two calendars and three spreadsheets – they stopped needing me to be the one to hold everything together. 

That’s what led me to build Admirra: a CRM for therapists that gave my team the visibility to make those calls themselves, instead of routing everything through me first.

Leadership isn’t about always being the one with all of the answers. It’s about building something that doesn’t depend on you being the only one who has them.

You Don’t Have to Be The One Holding It All

Letting go isn’t something that happens overnight. I wanted to trust my team immediately the moment I recognized how much I’d been holding, but wanting to and actually being able to were two different things.

What actually helped me make it happen was having the right systems in place, systems that let my team see the information they needed and make the calls they were already capable of making. Once that happened, trusting them became so much easier.

Your team is likely more capable than the number of questions in your inbox would suggest. They just haven’t had the systems that would let them show you what they can do without your input.

You don't have to be the one holding it all together. The right systems can hold some of that weight with you, the way they did for me, so leading doesn't mean disappearing into the therapy practice you built.