WHY HAVING A LEADERSHIP TEAM ISN’T ENOUGH

If you have capable leaders, why are you still in the middle of everything?

If you tell me, “I have a challenge with my leadership team because everything still comes back to me,” I won’t let us start by blaming the team. They might be the problem, but first I want to understand what actually happens when something goes wrong.

Leadership roles often grow with the business rather than being deliberately designed. Responsibilities get added over time. Decisions land with whoever has historically been good at catching them. And the founder fills whatever is left.

Start with one real decision

Say Sarah brings you a pricing decision on Tuesday, you’re surprised because you thought Sarah owned pricing? Before deciding she needs to “take more ownership,” walk backward through what happened.

Did Sarah think the decision was hers?

Maybe the role or decision aren’t as clear as you thought.

If she did, why did she bring it to you?

Did someone challenge her authority? Are the boundaries fuzzy? Does she still need your reassurance before she moves?

Did she have the information she needed?

You cannot own a decision if the information needed to make it lives somewhere you can’t reach..

Have you made her change decisions in the past that weren’t wrong?

She remembers.

Could you leave a different but workable decision alone?

Maybe it’s coming back because you have taught people that it will.

A real example

I worked with a founder who was spending about 50 hours a week in the business despite having a leadership team. We redesigned the organization around the business strategy and how the company actually needed to operate, defined role accountabilities, built a talent matrix and realigned the existing team. We did not add headcount and overall spend stayed the same. The founder’s weekly involvement dropped by roughly 40%, freeing that time for higher-value work.

That did not happen because we told people to be more accountable. The same team had clearer jobs, clearer decisions and a structure that made it easier to own the work.

Try this for one week

For one week, keep a record every time something comes back to you that you thought somebody else owned. Do not fix the pattern. Just catch it in the act. Ten examples will tell you more than yet another conversation about whether people need to “take more ownership.”

Complete it privately first. Capture what came back, who should own it, why it returned and what you did. Use another copy if you need more entries.

At the end of the week, tally why things came back: unclear ownership • missing information • overlapping roles • nobody owns it • capability gap • I took it back because I would have done it differently

Now we look for the pattern. If most of the entries point to one person, you may have a capability issue. If the same problem shows up across several people, you probably have a design problem. And if you keep writing “Took it,” you may have found part of the problem.

Before you add another leader, figure out what is actually missing. Sometimes the business genuinely needs another person. Sometimes it already has the right people, the business just need to let them do the work.

What is underneath the pattern?

A week of examples gives us something concrete to explore. It does not, tell us what is causing the pattern.

Beyond the Founder is Hargrove & Co.’s two-week independent assessment. I speak with you, your leadership team and other key people, observe key meetings and review available data to understand what may sit beneath the visible frustration.

You receive my findings and a high-level approach to addressing the gaps, including where deeper investigation is needed. We spend one to two hours walking through what I found and how I reached those conclusions, then check in again after 30 days.