“I’m paying directors good money… so why does everything still come back to me?”
The fact that this founder had reached the point of employing directors told me the business had grown. They had hired capable people, created senior roles and expected that this would allow them to delegate more responsibility, create some much-needed headspace and become more proactively strategic.
Great.
Except the reality didn’t quite equate.
Whenever something was new, awkward, urgent or commercially sensitive, it still came straight back to the core of the business: The Founder.
They were still the main decision-maker, the escalation point, the person who joined the dots and the person everyone checked with before they did anything. They couldn’t even go away for a weekend without urgent calls, questions and emails.
The founder was exhausted and increasingly frustrated. They were paying other people large sums of money to take some of the pressure, so they could focus on growing the business further, but somehow it felt worse. It felt harder.
No one seemed to do what they were supposed to do. People made decisions the founder didn’t agree with, asked too many questions or waited too long before acting.
There were moments when the founder genuinely felt they might as well sack them all and carry on doing everything themselves.
But the problem wasn’t as obvious as it first appeared, and it certainly wasn’t that the team wasn’t capable:
The business had grown faster than the leadership that ran it.
In the early years, there had never been the same need for clear authority, strong communication or an agreed way of making decisions. The founder knew everything, saw everything and made the important calls. It worked because the business was smaller and the founder could hold most of it in their head.
But now there were more people, more clients, more risk and more decisions to make. The informal way of leading the business no longer worked, yet nobody had consciously replaced it with anything else.
On the one hand, the founder felt they should still be at the centre of it all. It was their creation, their reputation and their money at risk. Nobody knew the business as well as they did and, if they were completely honest, they didn’t always trust that anyone else would make the same decision.
On the other hand, they were furious that their Directors weren’t stepping up and taking more ownership.
That was the constant internal contradiction.
The founder believed they had delegated responsibility because other people now had the titles, salaries and areas of responsibility. But real authority still sat with them.
The safest decision is still to ask the founder
Over time, this was exactly what the team had learned.
Not because anyone had deliberately told them that. It had been learned through hundreds of small moments…
A decision was made, but the founder changed it. A problem appeared, and the founder stepped in because it was quicker. Someone tried a different approach, and the founder questioned why they hadn’t done it the way it had always been done.
Eventually, checking with the founder became the safest way to operate.
This is exactly how a business becomes dependent on its founder and I see it all the time…
The founder becomes increasingly frustrated because the team won’t step up, while the team becomes increasingly cautious because they aren’t sure where the real authority sits.
The bigger the business becomes, the more commercially dangerous that gets. Decisions slow down, capable people stop thinking independently and the leadership team never develops the commercial judgement the next stage of growth will require.
Paying people more money and giving them senior titles does not create a leadership team. That only happens when they are given enough authority to make decisions—even when they may not make exactly the same decision as the founder.
Yes, the directors need to step up.
But if everything still comes back to you, it may be worth asking what happens when they actually try.