A founder reflects on scaling struggles: reluctance to delegate created bottlenecks, and lack of trust within the leadership team held back growth. External coaching revealed these blind spots early recognition could have accelerated everything.
Chapters
In terms of the leadership team, certainly over the last few years as you were scaling, you know, did all of your leaders make the leap? The journey looked like very typical, I think. Founder didn't want to give up control, didn't understand why in the beginning part of the journey, wondered why it wasn't scaling until you get some external expertise, some coaching that helps you realize you can't do it all and you are the bottleneck, by the way, Mr. Founder. The strange thing is other people, oh, this almost comes down to the trust thing, which I'm of great habit of, you know, 5 dysfunctions of the team trust. Clearly I hadn't built up enough trust because people were kind of telling me, but in a soft tone, which means they may be scared of me, which is a deficiency in myself. And you learn this, you go on a journey, you learn this. But as a founder, you start off and then your coach, for some reason you listen to your coach and the coach says exactly the same thing as some of your employees or senior people. And okay, yeah, I am the bottleneck. And when you realize that, great. It's like, oh my God, I wish I'd done this years ago.