Hi there,
A while back, I worked with a CEO who was brilliant, relentless, and exacting.
His startup was breaking into its first $10M year. But every time they got momentum, something bottlenecked. Engineering wouldn’t ship on time. Sales didn’t close fast enough. Leadership hires weren’t stepping up.
The problem?
He had an answer for everything.
In meetings, he’d jump in before the head of product could finish a sentence. He re-wrote client emails. He hovered over strategy decks like a stormcloud.
After one executive offsite, I asked him a simple question: “What does your team have to do to win?”
He paused.
“I don’t know,” he said. Then, after a long silence, he admitted: “...I have to let them.”
I was astonished and impressed with his self-recognition.
It turned out that their growth ceiling wasn’t strategy or product-market fit. It was the leader’s unconscious belief that if he didn’t control the outcome, the company would fail.
But here’s the paradox: If your team can’t grow, your company won’t grow.
And your team can’t grow if you’re always catching the ball before it hits the ground.
Mistaking control for competence
One of the most common traps in early leadership is mistaking control for competence.
On the surface, things run smoothly: Decisions get made, problems get solved, crises get contained. But underneath, something vital is missing: your team’s growth.
High-functioning teams require room to fail, learn, and rise again. Without that space, talent withers and initiative dies. And when every important decision routes through you, the organization slows to your bandwidth. You end up burned out and alone at the top.
Often, this pattern is fueled by the leader’s unconscious beliefs:
“I need to do it myself, or it won’t get done right.”
“I want my team to act like owners.”
“We can’t afford to make mistakes.”
These stories may sound reasonable, even admirable. But they build an invisible ceiling on what your company can become.
If success isn’t clearly defined and jointly owned, your team will feel unsafe to make mistakes, because they don’t have a way to measure success—outside of trying to read your mind.
And if your team feels unsafe making mistakes, your team will stop taking risks.
Without risk, there’s no innovation. And without innovation, your company won’t scale.
In other words: You can’t build a championship team by constantly benching your players.
Experiment
Define success out loud.
Write down what success looks like for each of your direct reports.
Make sure it’s operational, observable, and measurable.
Your subjective review cannot determine success.
Then walk each person through it. Do this in monthly time frames. Watch what shifts.
Make sure each person’s success does not require your intervention (if you need to tell them how to do the job, it requires your intervention).
Keep iterating until you have a team that is high functioning and that you don’t have to micromanage.
Big Love,
Joe
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