Overachieving managers don't delegate enough anyway – but this trend kicks into overdrive when the pressure is on. This diminishes trust between the manager and her employees; it causes employees to think they should do only what they're told; they aren't motivated enough and stop taking initiative. In short, it becomes a top-down management structure where the one at the top takes on too much. And it's risky on all counts.

Are you a hyper-achiever?
Do you concentrate on short-term gains and hardly give a thought to the long-term consequences of your choices? Do you neglect overall strategy and only plan through tactics? Do you manage results, not the people who have to give you the results? Are you territorial and only reluctantly cooperate with others?

If you answered 'Yes' to more than one of those questions, you have the tendency to be a destructive overachiever.

Keeping your 'Type A' personality in check
Being an overachiever isn't all bad. But the trick is to use these good traits to balance out the bad ones. Firstly, you need to understand that 'achievement' isn't the only motivating factor for success. Harvard psychologist David McClelland has found three inner motivators that explain good leadership:

Achievement – meeting or exceeding a standard.

Affiliation – maintaining close personal relationships with employees and clients.

Power – both individual (being strong, decisive and influencing others) and social (having a concern for group goals and empowering others to meet these goals).

Type-A's need to use the last two motivators to balance out the achievement drive. To do this, you need to learn new behaviours that reinforce these drives. Good leaders don't just use the leadership style that 'comes naturally' to them, they assess which leadership style would best suit the situation and then use that. It's called pragmatism – the most useful tool you'll ever learn.

Creating good leaders
When you establish that it's not all about you and what you can achieve, you'll be in a much better position to spot young leaders in your team. They, in turn, need to have an atmosphere in which they can flourish and prove themselves. It's your responsibility, as a manager, to create that space: