You built the business. It shouldn't require all of you to keep it running.
You built something that works. You hired people to help it grow. You put systems in place, delegated responsibilities and tried to get yourself out of the middle of everything.
And yet, somehow, too much still comes back to you.
The decisions. The problems. The final review. The things no one else seems quite willing, or able, to own.
Your business has evolved. Maybe it's time for your leadership to evolve with it.
Why this work
I've worked with leadership teams at West Pharmaceutical Services, Comcast, Encana Natural Gas — and Cabela's, back when its leadership team was still small enough to shape.
While most of that work has been inside large corporations, that experience is where I learned the importance of the relational aspects of team development. That's what I now bring to founders and their teams — while the way they work, lead and relate together is still taking shape.
When having a team hasn't created the freedom you expected
Maybe some of this sounds familiar.
And underneath all of this can be another thought that's harder to shake:
You've probably heard the obvious answers
There can be many reasons a team doesn't step up. They may lack the capability or confidence. Something in the system may be getting in the way. Or, without realizing it, you may have become part of a pattern that keeps pulling responsibility back toward you.
Understanding what's actually happening comes first, because the same visible problem can have very different causes—and require very different responses.
The shift
The business may not be asking you to do more. It may be asking you to lead differently.
Leadership starts within.
The way you lead grows out of who you understand yourself to be.
As a founder, you may never have consciously decided how you wanted to lead. You were building a business. Solving problems. Making decisions. Taking responsibility. And somewhere along the way, other people began looking to you for leadership.
A leadership identity develops through that experience, whether you consciously create one or not. It is shaped by what you come to believe, the roles you learn to play, what you absorb from other leaders and environments, and the ways of leading you discover will work.
The qualities that helped you build the business matter. Your drive. Your judgment. Your willingness to take responsibility. Your standards. Your ability to see what needs to happen and make it happen.
But success can also reinforce ways of operating that eventually make it difficult for other people to develop the same sense of responsibility and ownership around you.
Over time, some of those ways of leading can become so familiar that they simply feel like who you are as a leader.
But your leadership identity isn't fixed.
You can become more aware of what has shaped it—what you believe, what building the business has taught you, what you've carried forward from other environments, and what success has reinforced.
From there, you can decide what remains genuinely yours, what you want to carry forward, and who you want to become as a leader.
At some point, the leadership question changes from:
How much can I make happen?
to
What am I creating around me that allows other people to make things happen too?
This is how I think about the evolution of leadership. And it is the foundation of my work.
Self → Leadership → Relationships → Team
What happens within you shapes how you lead. How you lead shapes what happens between people. And what happens between people shapes what becomes possible together.
My work looks at you, the business you've built, and what's happening between the people inside it... so you can see more clearly what is creating the current dynamic and what needs to change.
That may include looking beneath how you're leading to understand the beliefs, stories and patterns shaping it—and developing greater capacity to lead from who you consciously choose to be.
What can change
As you become more intentional about who you are as a leader and how you lead, you begin to change what becomes possible around you.
- People who bring thinking instead of waiting for answers.
- Decisions that don't continually travel back to you.
- Greater ownership without constant follow-up.
- Honest conversations before small problems become expensive ones.
- A team you can genuinely trust with more.
- And more room for you to think, create, live—and decide what you want the business to become next.
These changes aren't created by the founder alone. But how you lead helps shape the conditions in which other people think, contribute, take responsibility and work together.
Real freedom comes when everything no longer has to depend on you.
If this is where you find yourself, a conversation is a good place to start.
Let's Have a Conversation