Of course…sometimes it is. Someone doesn’t have the capability. Their behaviour, or attitude, isn’t good enough. They aren’t putting in the effort. Or the company has simply outgrown them.

But how long those things are allowed to continue is a leadership problem.

Every leadership team I’ve worked with can tell you exactly who keeps them awake at night.

• The person who isn’t delivering.

• The person creating friction.

• The one everyone complains about after meetings and in 1:1s.

Finding them isn’t usually the difficult part. Leading them is.

And over time I’ve noticed that leaders don’t struggle equally with every performance issue.

Certain people create a kind of emotional paralysis.

• The founder who can’t let go of the person who helped build the company.

• The executive who tolerates behaviour they’d never accept from anyone else because the results are too valuable.

• The manager who keeps rescuing someone who never quite gets there on their own.

• The leader who calls it compassion when, in reality, they’re avoiding a difficult conversation.

On the surface, these look like four different employee problems.

But there is usually there is an underlying leadership problem.

Because by the time everyone agrees there’s an issue, what keeps someone in the wrong role is rarely a lack of evidence. It’s the story the leader tells themselves about why acting can wait.

The invisible cost of waiting

Earlier in my career, I worked with a founding leadership team who had become increasingly frustrated with one employee. Eighteen months later, the person was still in the role.

Nothing had changed except the cost.

The team’s frustration had grown. Standards had shifted. High performers had started asking why different rules seemed to apply to different people.

Looking back, the interesting part of that situation wasn’t the employee. It was us.

We didn’t need more evidence. We needed to understand why, despite having plenty of it, nobody was prepared to act. And that’s something I’ve seen repeatedly since.

Most organisations don’t get stuck because they fail to recognise underperformance. They get stuck because certain people trigger emotions that make otherwise capable leaders hesitate.

• Loyalty.

• Guilt.

• Fear.

• Hope.

• Gratitude.

Once those emotions enter the equation, we delay.

We rationalise. We create exceptions. We convince ourselves things will improve with just a little more time.

And because the intention behind that hesitation is often good, it’s easy to convince ourselves that waiting is the compassionate thing to do.

But keeping someone in the wrong role for too long isn’t a victimless act of kindness.

There is a cost, and it’s usually being paid by everyone around them.

• Work gets redistributed.

• Standards become negotiable.

• Other people notice what isn’t being addressed.

• Your strongest performers start wondering why they’re stretching when someone else doesn’t have to.

Poor performance is rarely contained to one individual because, over time, it changes the behaviour of the people around them.

Which is why leadership maturity isn’t simply about caring for people. It’s about being able to balance compassion with accountability.

The two aren’t competing values. They depend on each other.

Diagnose before you decide

One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is assuming every performance problem requires the same response.

It doesn’t.

Before deciding whether to coach someone, reset expectations, redesign a role or ultimately part ways, there are four questions I find useful.

1. Can they do it? Do they genuinely have the capability required for the role?

2. Will they do it? Do they consistently demonstrate the ownership, motivation and accountability the role requires?

3. Is it still the right role? Has the organisation evolved beyond what this role - or this person - was originally designed for?

4. Can others thrive around them? Does their behaviour make the people around them better, or does it diminish them?

Those questions matter because people we label as “poor performers” can actually be experiencing very different problems.

And each one requires a different leadership response.

Persona 1: The person everyone wants to succeed

This is probably one of the hardest performance conversations a leader has. Not because the evidence is unclear. Because everyone likes them.

They’re thoughtful. They work hard. They care. Nobody questions their effort or their intentions.

And that makes it incredibly difficult to say that it still isn’t enough.

Organisations don’t ultimately run on effort alone. They need outcomes too.

I’ve watched leaders spend years redesigning roles, extending timelines and creating more support for people who simply weren’t going to succeed in the position they occupied.

They weren’t failing because they didn’t care. The role required capabilities they didn’t have. And sometimes the kindest thing we can do is acknowledge that rather than keep asking someone to succeed in a role that repeatedly tells them they’re failing.

The leadership trap here isn’t kindness. It’s confusing kindness with avoidance.

Persona 2: The person you keep making exceptions for

Most organisations say culture matters. This is where that claim gets tested.

This person delivers exceptional results. Customers love them. Technically, they’re brilliant. Commercially, they’re invaluable. And because of that, leaders convince themselves the behavioural issues are manageable.

Until they aren’t.

The damage created by these people can be much harder to see than their individual results.

It’s the meeting where other people stop contributing. The collaboration that quietly disappears. The talented employee who eventually leaves because they don’t want to work around the behaviour anymore. The manager who concludes that different rules apply to different people.

The credibility leaders lose every time behaviour is excused because the numbers look good.

So the question isn’t simply:

How much value does this person create?

It’s also:

How much value does this person destroy while creating it?

If you’re only measuring the first, you don’t actually know how well they’re performing.

Persona 3: The person who helped build yesterday’s company

Few conversations are harder for founding leaders than this one. This person was there when nobody else believed in the business.

They worked impossible hours. Solved problems nobody else would touch. Helped build the company from almost nothing. They haven’t just worked there for a long time. They’ve become part of the story of the company itself.

But companies don’t stand still.

The skills required to build one stage of a company aren’t always the skills required for the next. And one of the most difficult things for a founder to accept is that loyalty and future fit aren’t the same thing.

One reflects what somebody has contributed. The other reflects what the organisation now needs.

Those two truths can exist at the same time.

You can be enormously grateful for what somebody has done and still recognise that the role has moved beyond them.

The most respectful leaders I’ve worked with don’t try to erase one truth to make the other easier.

They honour the contribution. And they tell the truth about the future.

Persona 4: The person who can’t move without you

This one is different because sometimes the performance problem isn’t entirely theirs.

Every decision comes back to you. Every obstacle requires your involvement. Every problem somehow ends up back on your desk.

Initially, it can feel good.

You’re helpful. Supportive. Needed.

Then eventually you realise you’ve become the operating system for someone else’s role. But dependency rarely appears overnight. And leaders often play a bigger part in creating it than they realise.

• We answer too quickly.

• We rescue too often.

• We step in before struggle has had a chance to build capability.

• We solve problems people were perfectly capable of solving themselves.

Sometimes we even redo the work because we know we can do it faster or better. Eventually, one person owns the thinking and the other owns the execution. And both people start to believe that’s simply how the relationship works. Then the leader becomes frustrated that the person isn’t taking enough ownership.

The goal of leadership isn’t to become indispensable. It’s to build people who don’t need you for every decision.

So when someone seems unable to move forward without your constant involvement, I think there are two uncomfortable questions worth asking.

Have they become dependent on me?

And:

Have I become dependent on being needed?

The broader pattern

The longer I’ve done this work, the less interested I’ve become in simply identifying “bad apples.”

I’m much more interested in why good leaders keep the wrong people in the wrong roles for far too long.

Because by the time everyone agrees there’s a performance problem, the thing stopping action often isn’t the evidence anymore.

It’s discomfort.

The discomfort of disappointing someone loyal. The discomfort of confronting someone powerful. The discomfort of admitting that the company has outgrown somebody who helped build it. The discomfort of recognising that you’ve created some of the dependency you’re now frustrated by. And discomfort is remarkably good at disguising itself as something more reasonable.

They just need another quarter.

I need to give them one more chance.

Now isn’t the right time.

We can’t afford to lose them.

I want to make sure we’ve done everything we can.

Sometimes those statements are true.

Sometimes they’re simply the story that allows us to postpone a conversation we don’t want to have.

The mirror

There’s one final part of this that I think leaders need to be willing to look at.

Not every performance problem was created by the person experiencing it.

Sometimes we’ve been unclear about what good looks like. Sometimes we’ve tolerated something for so long that it’s unreasonable to suddenly act surprised by it. Sometimes we’ve changed the role without acknowledging that the person we hired into it is now doing a completely different job. Sometimes we’ve stepped in so often that we’ve taught somebody not to think without us. And sometimes the person really is the problem.

Leadership is being able to work out which one you’re dealing with.

Because organisations rarely get stuck because of one employee. They get stuck because a leader postpones one difficult conversation for six months, then another, then another, until the exception quietly becomes the standard.

By then, the cost isn’t being carried by one person. It’s being carried by everyone around them.

The best leaders I’ve worked with aren’t unusually ruthless. They’re unusually honest. They tell the truth earlier. They can be grateful for what someone has contributed without pretending that contribution guarantees their future. They can care deeply about somebody and still hold them accountable. And they’re willing to examine their own part in a performance problem before deciding it belongs entirely to the person in front of them.

Because accountability isn’t the opposite of care.

Sometimes it’s one of the most important ways we show it.

“How long should I wait before putting this issue in writing?”

And usually my answer is:

Longer than reacting emotionally. Shorter than hoping it fixes itself.

Because despite what many people assume, most leaders are not avoiding documentation because they don’t care about accountability.

Usually, it’s the opposite.

They care deeply about the person involved.

• They want to give them another chance.

• They worry about damaging the relationship.

• They hope the issue will self-correct naturally.

• They don’t want to overreact.

• They’re unsure whether the issue is “serious enough” yet.

• They worry that writing something down suddenly changes the tone of the relationship forever.

And underneath all of this is one of the biggest misconceptions I see in leadership teams: the assumption that writing something down automatically means a formal process; escalation; HR involvement; legal action etc.

But, writing things down is simply good leadership communication. It creates clarity.

And in many situations, leaders waiting too long to create clarity is exactly what causes the issue to escalate.

Leaders Often Wait Until Emotion Has Already Built Up

By the time many managers decide to document concerns, frustration has usually been building for weeks or months.

There might have been some subtle hints and vague feedback but not enough direct, grounded clarity. And this is where performance conversations often start to go wrong.

As Brené Brown famously said: “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.”

And honestly, that principle explains a huge amount of what goes wrong in organisational performance management.

The issue is rarely that concerns exist. The issue is that concerns stay emotionally present but operationally vague for too long.

Writing Things Down Can Actually Reduce Escalation

One of the healthiest reframes leaders can make is understanding that documentation is not always the start of a formal process.

Sometimes it is simply the mechanism that helps everyone slow down and communicate more clearly.

Writing concerns down often helps leaders:
– articulate what they are actually worried about
– separate facts from emotional frustration
– identify patterns more objectively
– avoid inconsistent messaging
– provide concrete examples
– clarify expectations
– align on next steps and support

In other words: it often improves the quality of the conversation itself.

Writing creates precision and precision matters.

Particularly because employees deserve clarity on:

• what the concern actually is

• what good looks like

• what needs to change

• what support exists

• and what happens next.

Ironically, the leaders who communicate clearly earliest often end up needing formal processes the least.

The Problem Is Usually the Tone Leaders Attach to Documentation

What employees often react to is not the act of documentation itself. It’s the meaning attached to it.

Many employees have experienced documentation only in highly escalated environments: disciplinaries; performance warnings; legal disputes; termination processes etc.

So leaders sometimes unconsciously approach written follow-up with the same emotional weight.

And this means that they shift the tone, language becomes colder, more defensive and suddenly the relationship feels adversarial.

But it doesn’t have to.

One of the simplest ways to reduce unnecessary fear or escalation is to clearly articulate your intent.

For example:

“I wanted to put this in writing so that I’m being clear and fair about what I’m seeing, what needs to improve, and how I can support you moving forward.”

That feels very different to:

“This is now formal.”

Psychologically, that distinction matters enormously.

The Strongest Leaders Do Not Avoid Clarity

The best leaders I work with are rarely the harshest.

Usually, they are simply the clearest.

They do not weaponise process.
They do not hide behind HR language.
They do not escalate impulsively.

But they also do not leave people guessing because performance management should never feel like a sudden plot twist.

Communication starts to get lost, momentum slows, it becomes harder to get consistent results from people, and gradually you find yourself becoming the bottleneck. Your pulled into more decisions, more alignment, more problem-solving than you (or your business) can realistically sustain.

So the instinct is often to add another layer of managers. Another layer to support decision-making, improve communication, bring structure, and carry the load.

But the reality is:

Most companies don’t slow down because they lack managers.
They slow down because they haven’t redesigned how the organisation runs as it has scaled.

And hiring another layer too early doesn’t fix that.

The pattern you don’t see

In the early days of a start up, speed comes from proximity - being close enough to everything that decisions happen quickly and context is shared without effort.

You’re directly connected to customers, the product, hiring decisions, and the day-to-day trade-offs that move the business forward, which means there’s very little ambiguity and almost no need for translation.

But as the organisation grows, that proximity disappears.

With more people comes more complexity (more perspectives, more dependencies, more decisions than one person can hold) and over time, this begins to show up in execution. Decisions take longer, communication fragments, and what felt obvious before now requires alignment.

This is the moment many founders move to hiring more management.

When in reality, the organisation isn’t lacking people, it’s starting to hit a leadership and design ceiling.

One of the biggest risks in scaling isn’t hiring itself: it’s the timing and the intent behind hiring.

Early organisational decisions, particularly around roles, authority, and structure, tend to set patterns that are hard to unwind later, shaping how people operate long after the original context has changed.

Hiring a layer too early isn’t an inconsequential decision. It defines how power flows, how decisions get made, and whether the organisation builds around ownership or hierarchy.

And once that pattern is set, it’s difficult to reverse.

So ask these 3 questions before adding that next management layer:

Question 1: Are we solving for capacity… or avoiding clarity?

Hiring a layer feels like adding capacity - more people to manage workload, unblock teams, and drive execution - but if people don’t know what matters most, more capacity doesn’t improve outcomes, it simply increases activity.

Research consistently shows that alignment, not effort, is the real constraint, with Harvard Business Review frequently citing that a significant majority of employees (up to 95%!!) don’t clearly understand their organisation’s strategy.

Which means you can hire more managers, but if priorities are unclear, you’re just scaling confusion.

So, before you hire, ask:

• If I asked five people what matters most right now, would I get one answer?

• Do teams know what to stop, not just what to start?

• Are decisions slowing because of workload or uncertainty?

If it’s uncertainty, hiring won’t fix it.

Question 2: Are decisions slowing down because of volume… or because of design?

When everything starts to feel heavy, it’s easy to conclude that there are simply too many decisions, but in most cases the issue isn’t volume, it’s that decisions aren’t designed to happen without you.

This is the founder bottleneck. It shows up in micro behaviours - teams waiting for approval, leaders escalating instead of deciding, and you becoming the default point of all resolutions.

Over time, authority centralises, decision flow slows, and the organisation begins to operate as a single nervous system.

At its core, this is the founder’s dilemma: whether to retain control by staying involved in every decision, or to scale by designing a system that allows decisions to happen without you.

Because adding layers without redistributing control doesn’t solve the problem, it simply moves it further away.

Scaling isn’t about making better decisions. It’s about designing how decisions get made, through clear ownership, defined decision rights, and explicit guardrails.

Without that, every additional layer adds friction, not speed.

So, before you hire, ask:

• Where do decisions actually get stuck?

• Is it capability or permission?

• Could this decision happen without me if ownership was clear?

If the answer is yes, the solution isn’t another manager.

Question 3: Are we adding a layer… or compensating for a missing system?

One of the most common scaling mistakes is using people to solve system problems, hiring someone to “own” something that should instead be designed into how the organisation operates.

Instead of clarifying roles, designing processes, or standardising how work flows, companies add a person to absorb the complexity.

So, before you hire, ask:

• Is this role solving a repeatable problem?

• Could this be solved through a clearer system?

• Would this still work if this person wasn’t here?

If not, you’re not scaling.

In conclusion

Hiring another layer isn’t wrong but hiring it too early is one of the fastest ways to slow a company down.

Because layers don’t create clarity, fix decision-making, or replace systems. They amplify any dysfunction which already exists.

So if priorities are unclear, decisions are centralised, and systems are weak, adding more people won’t solve the problem, it will make it more complex. With additional overheads for good measure.

What the best leaders do instead

They pause before hiring and ask better questions - about what actually needs to change for the organisation to move faster, where the real constraint sits, and what this would look like if it worked without another layer.

Because the goal isn’t to build a bigger organisation. It’s to build one that executes with momentum.

• Teams start duplicating work.

• Decisions are made in isolation.

• Problems are only raised once they have already escalated.

• People start talking about each other, rather than to each other.

And the question gets asked:

“Why is no one talking to each other?”

The instinctive response is usually we need '“better communication” or “more collaboration.” Which tends to translate into more meetings and slack channels.

And for a short time, it may feel like some progress is being made, but it doesn’t last. Because communication is rarely the root of the problem.

The execution gap hiding underneath

Most organisations already struggle to execute their strategy effectively.

Research from Harvard Business Review and the Strategy Institute suggests that the majority of well-formulated strategies fail at the point of execution. Not because the strategy is wrong, but because the organisation cannot translate it into coordinated action.

Communication breakdown is one of the earliest signals of that failure. When people are not talking to each other, it is not just a collaboration issue. It is an execution issue. It is the organisation telling you that alignment has not been translated into the day-to-day decisions required to deliver the strategy.

In other words, the system is breaking down and this is where the implications become more significant.

• Priorities are interpreted differently across teams.

• Dependencies are missed.

• Decisions are made in isolation.

• Risks surface too late.

The organisation continues to move but not in the same direction.

What is really happening?

When communication starts to break down, there is almost always something more fundamental missing. Not at the level of tools or behaviour but at the level of organisational design.

Across organisations, three patterns show up consistently:

1. The absence of shared context

People communicate when they see relevance. Not because they have been told to, and not because a meeting exists, but because they understand how their work connects to something larger than their immediate task.

In many organisations, that connection is weaker than leaders realise.

Research from Gallup shows that fewer than half of employees have clarity on what is expected of them at work, and only a small proportion can clearly link their work to broader organisational priorities. Similarly, work by Robert S. Kaplan and David Norton suggests that the vast majority of employees do not understand their organisation’s strategy.

When that is the case, teams focus on what sits directly in front of them. They optimise locally. They move forward based on their own interpretation of what matters.

2. Ownership that is unclear

When ownership is not clearly defined, communication becomes ambiguous and, at times, risky. People are unsure about:

• Where decision boundaries sit

• When to involve others

• Whether stepping into a conversation is helpful or overstepping

So they stay within their lane. Over time, this creates silos.

What looks like a communication failure is often a lack of decision clarity. People are not avoiding communication; they are navigating an environment where the rules of engagement are unclear.

3. Psychological safety in practice

Psychological safety is often framed as a cultural aspiration, but in practice, it shows up when someone challenges a decision made by leadership; a team surfaces a risk that slows progress; or an individual raises something that may be unpopular. If, in those moments, input is dismissed, overridden or quietly ignored, it clearly signals that speaking up is not worth the risk.

Organisational psychology research consistently shows that when environments trigger even low-level threat responses - i.e., unclear expectations, inconsistent decision-making, or perceived negative consequences - people become more cautious, more inward-looking and less likely to share information.

This ultimately results in teams which:

• Contribute less.

• Challenge less.

• Communicate less.

Not because communication channels do not exist but because the conditions required for meaningful communication are not in place.

Why more communication makes it worse?

Faced with these dynamics, most organisations respond in the same way. They add more communication - meetings, updates and forums for collaboration.

But without addressing the underlying issues, this solves nothing. People attend meetings, but do not engage. Information is shared, but not acted on and conversations happen, but momentum doesn’t change.

Because communication cannot compensate for a lack of clarity, ownership or safety.

What actually drives communication?

Communication improves when three conditions are present.

• First, there is shared clarity. People understand what matters, how their work connects and where dependencies exist. This creates a natural need to communicate, because the work itself requires coordination.

• Second, ownership is clearly defined. People know where decisions sit, when to involve others and where they are expected to step in. This removes ambiguity and creates purposeful communication.

• Third, psychological safety is reinforced in practice. Not through statements, but through behaviour. When leaders consistently respond to input with openness, stand behind decisions and create space for challenge, communication becomes real.

In summary, when no one is talking to each other, it is easy to assume the problem is communication. Instead, it’s a signal that the organisation has not been designed to support coordinated execution.

Because in healthy systems, communication does not need to be forced. It happens naturally because the work requires it.

What is happening in that moment is often misdiagnosed as a communication issue or a capability gap. However, this is rarely the case. Instead, it’s a failure to scale how decisions are made.

In early-stage organisations, decision-making is naturally centralised. The same people who are closest to the problem are also the ones accountable for solving it. Context is shared, trade-offs are visible, and decisions move quickly because they sit close to the work. But as organisations grow, complexity increases and without deliberate redesign, decision-making fails to scale.

You see ownership disappear as leaders stay more involved in the day-to-day than they intended. Decisions begin to move upwards rather than outwards. And over time, the organisation adapts to this new reality.

This is how leadership bottlenecks are created.

What makes this particularly difficult is that it often feels like this shift to asserting more leadership control is helping.

Leaders stay close to decisions because they care, they see risks others might not, and ultimately they want to move things forward. But the cumulative effect is that teams begin to rely on that involvement, and decision-making capacity concentrates rather than distributes.

This has deeper behavioural consequences. When expectations are unclear, decisions are frequently revisited, and/or leaders override outcomes, it creates an environment where people become more cautious, more likely to seek validation, and less willing to act without approval.

At the same time, to counteract the indecision organisations often respond to this growing complexity by adding process - more meetings and approvals - without addressing the underlying issue, which is not a lack of structure, but a lack of clarity.

All of this impacts psychological safety. We have psychological safety when we believe we can make a call without being second-guessed, we can take a risk without disproportionate consequences, and we can trust our leaders to support the decisions we make. Without that, ownership will always default upwards.

What leaders consistently question, revisit or override becomes the signal for how decisions are really made. Over time, this shapes a culture of dependency, even in highly capable teams.

Scaling decision-making requires leaders to do less, not more. It requires a shift away from being the point of control which means resisting the instinct to step in, even when it would be faster in the moment. It means asking questions rather than providing answers and allowing decisions to be made with imperfect information.

Over time, teams respond to this shift. Not because they are told to take ownership, but because the environment makes it possible. People notice what actually gets rewarded and they adjust their behaviour accordingly.

At its simplest, every meaningful decision requires three things (3Cs):

1. Clarity on who is accountable for the outcome,

2. Clarity on who has the authority to make the decision, and

3. Clarity on the boundaries within which that decision can be made.

The real test of whether decision-making has scaled is not when things are going well, but when something goes wrong. When the stakes are higher, when the answer is less clear, when the pressure increases, do people step forward and make decisions, or do they look upwards and wait?

That moment tells you what situation you’ve built.

“Why does everything need to come to us?”

The answer, more often than not, isn’t one leaders want to hear.

Because over time, and usually without realising it, leadership teams have trained the organisation to behave this way.

What is a dependency culture?

A dependency culture is one where decisions consistently move upward, authority is either unclear or applied inconsistently, and teams begin to optimise for approval rather than ownership. Overtime, instead of asking “What should I do?”, they start asking “What does leadership say we should do?”, which is the point at which decision-making slows and performance quietly erodes, not because people are incapable, but because the system is broken.

1. Over-involving themselves in decisions

The first and most common way leadership teams create this dynamic is by over-involving themselves in decisions, which rarely looks like control in the moment but instead presents as support. Leaders join meetings “just to help,” offer input “just to guide,” and sense-check decisions “just to make sure,” all of which are individually reasonable behaviours but collectively create a pattern where very little moves without them.

I once worked with a leadership team where a VP assigned a project to their team, but when it didn’t progress in the way they expected, they stepped back in and completed it themselves, believing they were unblocking delivery, when in reality what they were signalling was that ownership was conditional and could be taken back at any point.

What this creates, unintentionally, is a signal: that judgment alone is not enough, and that the real decision only happens once leadership has been involved, which in turn leads people to escalate earlier, seek more validation and ultimately wait, not because they lack capability, but because they have learned where the true authority sits.

2. Creating inconsistent decision rules

The second pattern is less visible but equally impactful, which is the creation of inconsistent decision rules, where the same type of decision is handled differently depending on the person, the moment or the level of pressure in the business. Sometimes leaders delegate fully, sometimes they override decisions after the fact, and sometimes they step in late, reshaping outcomes that teams believed they owned.

From a leadership perspective, this often feels pragmatic and responsive; from a team perspective, it feels unpredictable, and unpredictability is what drives hesitation, because team members are no longer just making decisions, they are trying to anticipate how leadership will react to those decisions.

This is where decision-making starts to slow, not because people don’t know what to do, but because they are trying to get it right for leadership.

3. Rewarding escalation over ownership

The third, and often most ingrained, pattern is what gets rewarded, because culture is shaped far more by what is reinforced than what is said, and in many organisations the behaviours that are most visibly recognised are those that prioritise escalation i.e., flagging risks early, looping in leadership, and keeping everyone aligned. These are important qualities, but when they become the dominant signals, they create a simple equation within the organisation: escalation feels safe, and ownership feels risky.

I often see this play out in a very specific way: a strong mid-level leader makes a decision, the decision is not perfect, leadership overrides it and in that moment, the lesson is not just learned by that individual but by everyone observing it, which is that decisions are not truly owned unless they are endorsed from above, and that the safest course of action is not to decide, but to escalate.

Why this happens

None of these behaviours are intentional; they are the natural result of leadership teams trying to stay close to the business, remain aligned and reduce risk, but without clear decision ownership, they create the opposite effect, where decisions drift upward by default.

This is where concepts like Agency Theory become relevant, because they highlight the inherent tension between those who carry accountability and those who are expected to execute. Leaders stay close because they feel the weight of outcomes, while teams hesitate because they don’t fully own that same level of risk, and without a system that clearly transfers decision ownership, nothing changes or improves.

Breaking the pattern

Dependency cultures don’t shift through messaging or encouragement; they shift through behaviour and behaviour reinforcement. This means leadership teams need to be deliberate about stepping out of decisions earlier, defining clear ownership and backing decisions even when they are not exactly what they would have chosen themselves. If they don’t back a decision or something needs to change, they need to communicate clearly and intentionally why.

If your team keeps bringing you problems, it is rarely because they cannot solve them, but because the system you have built tells them not to.

“I’m exhausted. We’ve built a leadership team, but somehow everything still ends up with me.”

A founder said this to me recently. On paper, everything indicated that the company had scaled - headcount was doubling year-over-year, there was now a whole senior leadership team, more managers, more structure, more hierarchy. And yet, the founder of this organisation still felt that every meaningful decision landed with him. And this isn’t unusual.

Founders can find themselves still at the centre of everything happening in their growing organisations - whether that’s pricing changes, key hires, trade-offs, or leadership team conflicts etc.

In an ideal world, as companies grow, things should get easier. But this is often the point where many companies begin to feel slower, heavier and more political. And in this scenario, the founder often becomes the bottleneck.

And this isn’t because (at least not usually) that they want control, but rather because the system still requires it.

The illusion of scale

While the organisation has expanded… the decision-making architecture hasn’t changed. The company has grown, but most companies don’t spend much time thinking about how decisions actually get made and what needs to change.

When the company was smaller, everyone instinctively knew who was responsible for what. But as more people are added, the founder stays - or even becomes - the final sign-off on hiring, the escalation point for problems, the “gut check” on strategy and the unblocker for cross-functional conflict and so on.

This is not a scaled organisation. This is just a bigger one.

Greiner’s Growth Model describes it as the crisis of autonomy - the moment when companies outgrow founder-led decision-making, but haven’t yet built the systems to replace it so everything just slows down in the middle.

This is not a talent problem

Most founders land on the same conclusion: “We just need stronger leaders” or “I’ve hired the wrong people.”

Of course, sometimes this is true. But more often, it’s not. Even the strongest leaders will defer when decision rights and accountability are unclear.

Agency Theory describes the natural tension between founders (principals) and leaders (agents). Founders carry the ultimate risk, so they stay close to decisions.
Leaders don’t fully carry that risk, so they hesitate to act and a vicious circle develops.

As Harvard Business Review notes, a significant proportion of decision-making in organisations is slow or ineffective and not because people lack capability, but because the system doesn’t support effective, decentralised decision-making.

What’s really happening

When everything flows through the founder, three things are almost always true:

1. Trust hasn’t been operationalised

You might say you trust your leaders, but if every decision still comes back to you, the system is indicating otherwise.

2. Decision rights are implicit, not explicit

People don’t know:

• What they can decide

• What needs input

• What requires escalation

So they default to the safest behaviour available - escalating.

3. The cost of being wrong is higher than the cost of delay

People optimise for alignment, consensus and safety rather than speed.

What makes this dynamic so heavy isn’t just the number of decisions - it’s the type of decisions. It means founders end up spending their time on things which aren’t what they are uniquely good at, but rather what they have hired and paid other people to do.

What is scaling?

The truth is that scaling isn’t just about adding people, it’s about removing yourself from decisions before it feels comfortable to do so.

Real scale looks like decisions being made without you, and problems being solved before you hear about them. Real scale means the founder spending time on the things which they are uniquely good at.

Ask yourself

If your calendar is still full of decisions that shouldn’t need you…

You haven’t built a leadership team. You’ve built a dependency structure around yourself and no organisation scales that way.

Instead of asking: “Why am I still involved in everything?”

Ask: “What decisions have I failed to transfer?”

Scale doesn’t happen when you hire more leaders. It happens when you redesign how decisions get made.

Research suggests organisations achieve less than 70% of their intended strategic results (HBR, 2025), and as many as 95% of employees don’t fully understand their organisation’s strategy (Kaplan & Norton).

So it’s tempting to assume the solution is setting better goals and companies often turn to OKRs to solve this problem. But if the issue sits elsewhere, OKRs can actually exaggerate execution issues rather than solve them.

Before introducing OKRs, there are five things leaders should consider first:

1. Leadership alignment

If leaders interpret strategy differently, OKRs will only amplify any confusion and misalignment.

Each team will write goals that make sense within their focus areas, but the organisation will pull in different directions and not have the same trade-offs.

Because alignment comes from leaders agreeing on and committing to:

• what actually matters
• what trade-offs they’re willing to make
• what success looks like

Without that, OKRs become just documentation and don’t offer any clarity on direction.

2. Decision ownership

Many organisations introduce OKRs while decision rights remain unclear.

When teams don’t know who actually owns decisions, two things happen: people escalate upward or they take no action. Either way, execution slows.

Because goals don’t fix unclear ownership.

3. Performance expectations

OKRs assume leaders are reinforcing consistent standards across teams but in many organisations, different leaders tolerate very different behaviours. Without consistent performance expectations, OKRs simply formalise the inconsistency.

4. Operating rhythm

OKRs work best when they sit inside a clear operating cadence with leaders regularly reviewing progress, teams understanding priorities and mechanisms to ensure that decisions happen quickly when things drift. Without this rhythm, OKRs become quarterly exercises rather than a tool for execution and the day-to-day reality has very little in common with the OKR tracker.

5. Leadership proximity

As organisations grow, leadership teams often become more distant from the work and information becomes filtered. Decisions happen further away from the teams delivering the results and OKRs risk becoming another layer of abstraction. Goals only work when leaders stay close enough to the organisation to understand whether they’re actually achievable.

OKRs Aren’t the Problem

OKRs can be incredibly powerful if they are designed and delivered well. They work best when they sit on top of a functioning leadership system.

Without leadership alignment, decision clarity, consistent expectations, operating rhythm and proximity to the work…OKRs won’t fix your execution problems - especially not in the long-term.

So…before introducing OKRs, leaders might ask themselves - are we trying to solve a goal problem or an execution problem?

“The culture just isn’t what it used to be.”

It’s never positive and is usually said with a mixture of nostalgia and frustration - an acknowledgement that something just feels different.

The instinctive conclusion is that the company is suffering from culture drift but most of the time, culture isn’t what has changed but instead the level of complexity within that culture.

Culture Feels Strong When Companies Are Small

In early-stage organisations, culture often feels incredibly powerful.

Proximity means everyone understands what matters - decisions happen quickly, behaviours are easy to observe, communication is informal and people connect in ways that feel energising and full of momentum.

But this isn’t only because the culture is strong, it’s also because the organisation itself is simpler.

Structures and hierarchy are light, processes and policies are minimal and information flows directly.

Alignment happens naturally because people share the same vision and context.

Growth Introduces Distance

As organisations scale, something subtle begins to change and distance appears.

Not just physical distance, but organisational distance, driven by creeping complexity.

• Information becomes filtered through layers.

• Leaders spend more time with other leaders than with their teams.

• Decisions happen further away from the work.

• Processes and policies begin replacing judgement and informal coordination.

None of this is unusual but complexity changes how culture operates.

Culture Stops Being Ambient

In small organisations, culture is ambient, meaning that people absorb it simply by being around the founders and early team.

Organisational sociologist Stephen Vaisey’s work on culture suggests that much of our behaviour is shaped not by explicit rules, but by internalised habits and cues learned through experience.

In small organisations, those cues are everywhere.

People constantly observe how founders behave, how decisions are made, and what gets rewarded.

But as organisations grow these cues weaken and without reinforcement, culture stops being absorbed and starts being interpreted.

And interpretation is what causes the drift.

Culture has to be reinforced intentionally, through:

• leadership behaviour

• decision making

• performance expectations

• what gets rewarded

• what gets tolerated

If leaders don’t actively reinforce the culture, something else takes its place.

Different teams start developing slightly different norms, leaders tolerate different behaviours and expectations begin to diverge.

So, what many leaders interpret as culture loss is often something else.

They are missing the clarity and alignment that existed when the company was simpler.

Culture Isn’t What You Say

One of the biggest misconceptions about culture is that it lives in values.

But culture isn’t defined by what organisations say. It’s defined by what leaders consistently reinforce.

For example: if a company says it values ownership but leaders override decisions, people stop taking ownership.

If a company says it values performance but tolerates the opposite, standards drift.

Culture is not the values on the wall.

It’s the patterns of behaviour that leadership allows to persist.

Culture at Scale Requires Reinforcement

Strong cultures in larger organisations don’t happen by accident. They require leaders to:

• stay close to the organisation

• reinforce expectations consistently

• model the behaviours they want repeated

• intervene when standards drift

In other words, culture at scale requires leadership discipline.

Toyota’s production system offers an example. The Andon cord allows any employee on the production line to stop production if they detect a problem. But the real cultural reinforcement doesn’t come from the cord itself, it comes from how leaders respond. When the cord is pulled, leaders immediately go to the line to help solve the problem. The message this reinforces is clear: everyone is accountable for results and quality matters more than speed. Repeated thousands of times, this behaviour allowed Toyota to maintain a culture of quality and accountability even as it grew into one of the largest manufacturers in the world.

The Real Work of Leadership

As organisations grow, leadership becomes less about direction and more about reinforcement.

The work shifts from creating culture to sustaining it under complexity, which is the harder part because the larger the organisation becomes, the easier it is for leaders to become disconnected from how the culture is actually experienced.

And once that happens, culture starts to drift.

The Question Leaders Should Ask

So when leaders say: “Our culture isn’t what it used to be.”

The better question might be: Have we evolved how we reinforce culture as the organisation has grown more complex?

Because the reality is this: you probably don’t miss your old culture, you miss when the company was simpler.

Not because people aren’t capable and well intention but because leadership habits haven’t evolved with the company.

1. Leaders become disconnected from the organisation

This is surprisingly simple, leaders stop listening to their organisation. As companies grow, leadership teams usually find themselves further removed from the day-to-day work. This looks like:

• fewer direct conversations with teams
• more filtered information through layers
• decisions made in leadership rooms without organisational context

Over time leaders lose the signal from the organisation and shift into a ‘power-over’ style of decision making.

Decisions become slower and less confident, people take less ownership, teams escalate everything upward because leadership need to approve and leadership becomes the bottleneck.

This is incredibly damaging.

McKinsey (2019) found that only ~20% of organisations believe they excel at decision-making, yet decision effectiveness is one of the strongest predictors of organisational performance.

Execution speed isn’t just a structural challenge, it’s often a leadership proximity problem.

2. Unclear/Inconsistent Performance Expectations

Another subtle slowdown happens when leadership teams stop reinforcing the same standards.

The larger the organisation becomes, the more leaders there are and the more likely it is that different leaders begin tolerating different behaviours.

One team moves fast while another over-analyses everything. One leader addresses issues early and another avoids them.

Unless the organisation establishes clear expectations and holds leaders consistently accountable to them, the company gradually starts operating and executing at multiple speeds.

3. Avoiding Conversations

As organisations grow, difficult conversations often happen later and less often. Leaders delay addressing issues because:

• they want to preserve harmony
• they worry about losing someone
• they feel removed from the situation
• the organisation has become more complex

But small issues compound quickly and if communication and feedback aren’t prioritised: misalignment grows; trust erodes; performance drifts and execution slows.

Amy Edmondson’s well-known research on psychological safety describes it as an environment where people feel safe taking interpersonal risks. But psychological safety is often misunderstood, it isn’t about comfort, it’s about being able to challenge one another to be the best version of ourselves for the business.

These are all leadership system problems. Execution improves dramatically when leaders:

• stay close to the organisation
• reinforce consistent expectations
• address issues early

Which of these slows execution most in your organisation?

They analyse market size, revenue potential, competitive dynamics, legal exposure, and employment requirements.

But there is another factor that quietly determines how difficult expansion will actually be and how much readiness is required: that’s distance. But not just geographical distance.

The structural distance between how your organisation operates today and the new market you want to enter.

The further the distance, the greater the leadership capability and organisational readiness required for expansion to succeed. Understanding this distance is one of the most important and most overlooked aspects of global expansion.

The Hidden Complexity of Distance

It is easy to assume that expanding into one country is broadly similar to expanding into another. But expansion difficulty is determined by how different the environment is from the one your organisation already understands.

This is where many leadership teams underestimate complexity.

Markets that appear similar on paper can behave very differently in practice. And markets that are structurally distant require fundamentally different leadership capability to operate effectively.

To understand this more precisely, I love to use the CAGE Distance Framework.

The CAGE Distance Framework

The CAGE Distance Framework was developed by strategy professor Pankaj Ghemawat of Harvard Business School and is outlined in his book Redefining Global Strategy (highly recommend reading this one).

It provides a way of understanding distance across four dimensions:

1. Cultural

2. Administrative

3. Geographic

4. Economic

These four dimensions determine how difficult it will be for an organisation to operate effectively in a new market.

Ultimately, the greater the distance across these dimensions, the greater the level of readiness required.

Cultural Distance: How Work Is Experienced Differently

Cultural distance reflects differences in norms, behaviours, and expectations around work. This includes:

• hierarchy and power distance

• communication styles

• language differences

• attitudes to authority

• feedback and conflict norms

• expectations around working hours and flexibility

• values etc

Without cultural literacy, leaders misinterpret signals, make incorrect assumptions, and create unintended friction.

Administrative Distance: How Systems and Institutions Differ

Administrative distance reflects differences in legal systems, political environments, regulatory requirements, and institutional structures.

This includes similarities or differences in:

• currencies

• closed or open markets

• employment law

• tax regimes

• regulatory complexity

• government intervention etc

Geographic Distance: How Physical Separation Creates Operational Complexity

Geographic distance affects more than travel time. Considerations here include:

• Physical distance

• Timezones

• Climate differences

• Weather events

• Remoteness and geographic size

• Connectivity and communication links etc.

Organisations that rely heavily on proximity for alignment often struggle when geographic distance increases.

Economic Distance: How Market Maturity Shapes Expectations

Economic distance reflects differences in market maturity, infrastructure, and economic conditions. Including:

• cost of living differences

• labour market competitiveness

• compensation expectations

• economic environment etc.

For example, compensation strategies used to attract early hires in emerging markets can create long-term internal equity challenges if not designed carefully.

Why Distance Determines Readiness Requirements

The CAGE framework highlights a simple but critical truth:

Readiness is not universal, it’s relative.

Expanding from the UK to Australia requires a very different level of readiness than expanding from the UK to Japan or even the UK to France.

The greater the CAGE distance, the greater the readiness required.

This is why expansion that appears simple at the outset can become complex quickly.

Distance itself is not a barrier. Many organisations successfully operate across high-distance markets but success requires recognising that leadership capability must evolve alongside geographic reach.

The greater the distance, the more important the following become:

• cultural literacy

• operating model clarity

• leadership judgment

• psychological safety

Without these capabilities, distance amplifies small misalignments into structural problems.

To help leaders assess this more systematically, I’ve incorporated distance considerations into the Global Expansion Readiness Assessment. Its free but if you find it useful, I’d love it if you could subscribe for future content.

Undoubtedly, these are real issues, but when things go wrong they are rarely the root cause of failure.

In nearly twenty years leading HR across multiple continents, industries, and risk environments, I’ve seen very few global expansions fail solely because a company didn’t know the law.

The real failure emanated from leadership misjudging readiness.

A Leadership Blind Spot: Reward, Risk & Readiness

In my experience, every global expansion decision sits at the intersection of three forces:

The three Rs of international expansion: Reward, Risk and Readiness.

Reward is what gets most of the attention. Leaders get excited at the prospect of new customer opportunities, opening up new revenue lines, accessing new markets, talent pools and cementing their competitive positioning. Its exciting and energising so somewhere leaders love to put their focus.

Risk is what gets managed. Leaders understand that they need to get - or have their HR teams get - an understanding of legal exposure, employment compliance, entity options, accounting and tax implications etc. These risks are documented, structured, and typically owned by Legal and HR.

But Readiness - the third R - is what most often determines whether expansion succeeds and it is the least rigorously assessed.

Most Organisations Over-Optimise for Reward and Under-Invest in Readiness

In practice, many leadership teams evaluate the reward case thoroughly. They model revenue potential, assess market size, build long-term plans and analyse potential business models.

They consider risk in structured ways, often involving Legal and HR to ensure contracts, tax, and employment frameworks are in place.

But readiness is often assumed rather than assessed.

This is because, there is an implicit belief that the organisation will adapt as it goes. That as long as risk is avoided, everything else can be managed as the company expands.

But this is where the real exposure begins because when readiness is insufficient, the consequences rarely appear immediately. They emerge slowly, through operational friction, leadership strain, decision bottlenecks, divergent cultures and lack of strategic alignment.

What Readiness Actually Consists Of

Readiness is not about having perfect policies or gold-standard risk management. It’s truly about whether the organisation has the leadership capability and operating discipline to function effectively on a global stage.

Here are four key components to readiness:

Cultural literacy

Leaders must understand that employment and business success are not governed by law alone, but by cultural norms.

Expectations around hierarchy, feedback, authority, working hours, and termination vary significantly across markets. Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions framework illustrates this clearly, showing how differences in power distance, individualism, uncertainty avoidance, and communication norms shape how work is experienced and how leadership is interpreted.

Applying home-country assumptions in a different cultural context creates friction, disengagement, and often unintended risk, not because leaders lack intent, but because behaviours that signal clarity and effectiveness in one culture can signal insensitivity or poor judgment in another.

Cultural distance increases leadership complexity far more than most organisations anticipate. My next article on the CAGE Distance Framework will cover this in more detail.

Decision clarity

Expansion introduces additional ambiguity around authority and decision making. Who owns employment decisions locally? What authority sits centrally? Who is accountable for compliance, compensation, and termination? Who can decide pricing and negotiate with customers? What should and should not be decentralised?

When decision ownership is unclear, organisations default to informal decision-making, resulting in drops in collaboration and alignment leading to inconsistency, delays, frustrations and ultimately risk exposure.

Leadership judgment

Global expansion increases the number of decisions leaders must make in environments they do not fully understand. Without the experience or context to recognise what they don’t know, leaders may make decisions that appear efficient in the short term but create structural risk over time.

Psychological safety

This is one of the most underestimated components of readiness. Local teams are often the first to see emerging risks. But if they do not feel safe escalating concerns, or if escalation pathways are unclear, problems remain hidden until they become expensive or difficult to resolve.

Illustrative Case Study: Tesco’s expansion into the United States. Tesco launched its Fresh & Easy chain in 2007 and exited six years later after losses of approximately £1.2 billion. Compliance was not the barrier - the failure stemmed from misjudging readiness. Leadership assumed that a retail model successful in the UK would translate directly to the US, but differences in consumer behaviour, shopping patterns, and operating realities required far greater adaptation than leadership had anticipated. A readiness failure that compromised the whole US strategy.

In summary, the companies that struggle most with global expansion are rarely those that ignored compliance entirely. They are the ones that pursued reward faster than they developed their readiness.

Resources

To help you assess this more systematically, I’ve created a Global Expansion Readiness Assessment. You can access it here, and please subscribe.

My next article will be on how to determine the level of readiness required depending on the country you are entering because readiness is not universal. It varies significantly depending on where you are expanding.

A few years ago I watched a long-standing relationship between a manager and a team member break down after a project was reassigned. Nothing dramatic had happened. No demotion, no conflict, no formal consequence.

Yet the response was immediate: anxiety, defensiveness, withdrawal and ultimately it cost them their relationship.

And this isn’t rare.

When it happens, the explanation usually defaults to a personality judgement: sensitivity, attitude, resistance, engagement.

But most of the time the reaction isn’t about the work at all.

It’s about threat.

The Brain Doesn’t Separate Social Risk from Real Risk

Our brains do not strongly distinguish between physical danger and social danger.
A loss of standing, predictability or fairness activates the same protective systems designed for survival.

So a meeting, a decision or a change in scope can trigger a reaction logic alone cannot calm. The person isn’t choosing to overreact - their brain is choosing to protect.

The SCARF model, developed by David Rock, helps explain why.

It describes five social needs that strongly shape behaviour at work:

• Status

• Certainty

• Autonomy

• Relatedness

• Fairness

When one of these feels threatened, people move into protection mode. Most workplace “overreactions” sit inside one of these domains.

How This Shows Up at Work

Status: “Where do I stand?”

Status isn’t hierarchy. It’s perceived importance in a group.

Triggers include reporting line changes, being left out of decisions, role scope shifts or ideas being ignored. To the organisation these may seem minor; to the individual they signal loss of standing.

Certainty: “What is happening?”

People tolerate bad news better than unclear news.

Changing priorities without explanation, vague expectations or delayed decisions create more stress than the outcome itself. The mind fills gaps with worst-case assumptions because prediction is essential for functioning.

This is why teams often prefer a clear “no” to an uncertain “maybe.”

Autonomy: “Do I have control?”

Micromanagement is only one autonomy threat.

Constant revisions, late approvals or decisions reversed after work is completed weaken the link between effort and outcome. Motivation drops not because people care less, but because control disappears.

Relatedness: “Am I safe here?”

Relatedness determines whether feedback feels developmental or personal.

With trust, feedback feels like support. Without it, the same words feel like judgement.

Nothing in the message changes, only the perceived safety around it.

Fairness: “Is this just?”

Perceived unfairness is one of the strongest behavioural triggers.

Inconsistent standards, unequal consequences or opaque decision-making produce reactions that appear disproportionate because fairness is a foundational social expectation.

People rarely argue over outcomes. They argue over whether the rules were applied consistently.

Why This Matters for Leaders

Most workplace behaviour is not driven by motivation or attitude but by perceived safety across one or more of these five domains.

When leaders try to fix behaviour directly - be more positive, be less defensive, be more engaged - they address the symptom rather than the cause.

Behaviour changes fastest when the perceived threat changes.

A Practical Shift

Before interpreting behaviour, ask:

Which SCARF element might feel threatened?

A defensive employee may be protecting status.
A disengaged one may lack autonomy.
An anxious team may lack certainty.

Address the need and the behaviour often resolves itself.

If you are anticipating a decision or conversation might trigger one of these domains and want to think through how to communicate it please send me a note and we can chat.

A small adjustment in framing, timing or context often prevents a much larger cost later.

You play it out in advance. You explain the issue, choosing your words carefully, and within moments the discussion shifts. The person explains, justifies, argues or quietly withdraws.

So the next time the moment approaches, you hesitate. You delay raising it, soften your language, or convince yourself it will resolve on its own. After all, they’ll just become defensive anyway, so why start a conversation that goes nowhere?

For many leaders, the difficulty of feedback is not knowing what to say. It is anticipating the reaction that may follow, the emotional work required to navigate it, and quietly deciding that it’s just not worth it.

Why feedback triggers defensiveness

When leaders give feedback, they believe they are answering a practical question: what needs to improve?

But the receiver is often asking a different question: what does this mean about me and for me?

This is what makes feedback conversations confusing. Rationally, most of us want to improve. We know growth requires awareness, and few people would openly argue they don’t want to get better at their job. Yet the moment feedback feels like a judgement of who we are rather than what we did, the brain reacts before logic has time to catch up.

Human beings are highly sensitive to signals about competence, status and belonging. When feedback sounds like an evaluation of identity rather than an observation about behaviour, the mind shifts into protection mode. Instead of thinking this will help me improve, the instinctive reaction becomes I need to defend myself.

To avoid this reaction, leaders often soften or generalise the feedback.

Softening feedback looks like resorting to “You’re doing great overall, but maybe think about…” Or they use the classic sh*t “sandwich” approach: positive, negative, positive. This tends to create more uncertainty, not less.

Generalising looks like:

• “You need to communicate better.”

• “You need to be more strategic.”

• “You have poor attention to detail”

This feels clearer but still triggers defensiveness because it sounds like a character/competency judgement rather than a behaviour observation, in other words, you are a bad communicator, you aren’t strategic etc.

Three strategies to land feedback without triggering defensiveness

1) Focus on the behaviour, not the person

Defensiveness reduces when feedback becomes something both people can hear rather than something one person believes. To do this, instead of describing the person, describe the moment.

Rather than “you need to communicate better” anchor the conversation in an example: what happened, when it happened, and what followed.

For example, instead of “you’re a bad communicator,” try:
“In yesterday’s client call, the timeline changed but the team wasn’t informed, which meant they continued working to the original plan. How could you have handled that differently to be more effective?”

2) Separate impact from intention

A second shift is removing any assumptions you have about motive or intent.

As leaders we love to psychoanalyse and try to diagnose the reason for someone’s behaviour i.e., you didn’t prepare, you don’t care, you’re not engaged, you’re not trying etc. The fact is, inferring intent invites debate because it cannot be proven and people hate to be judged.

Ask questions to understand reasons more deeply i.e., “how much time did you take to prepare?”, “what do you think you could do better?” etc.

When the focus moves from guessing motivation to understanding, the conversation becomes more practical rather than personal.

3) Give feedback somewhere to go

Defensiveness is strongest when feedback feels like judgement without direction.

When feedback includes a concrete next step, the discussion becomes forward-looking. It signals that the purpose of the conversation is development, not criticism.

Summary

Ultimately, defensiveness isn’t caused by feedback itself. It’s caused by uncertainty about what the feedback means and the intent behind giving it.

When people feel judged, they protect themselves. Most people don’t resist improving. They resist feeling judged.

So if you’ve been avoiding feedback because you expect resistance, the answer isn’t softer wording or better timing. It’s positioning with clarity about what happened, why it mattered, and what comes next.

When feedback focuses on behaviour instead of identity, you’re no longer confronting the person, you’re helping them see what you see.

Not because we’re overwhelmed with tasks but because people leadership carries a different kind of weight, it is emotionally heavy.

If you’re a leader who cares, you find yourself thinking about conversations before they happen and replaying them afterwards. You wonder if that pause in the meeting meant silent disagreement. You weigh whether stepping in will help or make things worse.

The strain you feel rarely comes from the technical complexity of the work itself. More often, it comes from the human interpretation around it.

And occasionally the thought appears: would it be easier to just go back to being an individual contributor?

Most of us step into leadership because we are technically good at our jobs. We solve problems quickly, deliver reliably, and earn trust through our competence and capability. Promotion looks like a larger version of the same: more responsibility, broader scope, and higher seniority.

In reality though, leadership is not a scaled-up individual contributor role but something fundamentally different. Because your effectiveness no longer comes from what you can personally contribute, but rather from what you enable others to deliver.

Very little prepares leaders for this shift. Most leadership training teaches planning, prioritisation, delegation and decision-making, yet the daily difficulty sits elsewhere.

The fact is, you can give identical feedback to two capable people and create opposite effects: one feels trusted, the other discouraged. You offer autonomy and one person grows while another becomes lost. You introduce urgency and one individual sharpens their focus while others disengage.

Leadership is really hard work and can be draining in ways that you don’t experience as an individual contributor.

Because of this, managers consistently report higher stress and worse work-life balance than the people they manage, and they are significantly more likely to feel burned out or consider leaving their roles. One Harvard Business Review report suggests that 53% feel burned out at work. That means that potentially half of the people managers around you feel the same.

Why is it so hard? Because people leaders are rarely trained to manage human complexity.

Every person on a team operates within a slightly different internal world shaped by their ambition, family circumstances, past experiences, upbringing, tolerance for ambiguity, comfort with conflict, response to pressure and much more. Leadership means translating a single external reality into multiple understandings that each individual can act upon. This consumes a remarkable amount of mental time and energy.

The role becomes harder still because leaders must also manage themselves. Earlier in your career, competence provided predictability - you could finish work yourself, move quickly, and demonstrate value directly. Leadership removes that feedback loop and replaces it with dependence on others’ judgement, pace and performance.

In response, ego appears in subtle ways: stepping in too early because you know the answer, over-explaining to prove credibility, avoiding difficult feedback to preserve relationships, or defending ideas instead of exploring them.

The habits that once created success begin to create friction and lead to the opposite of positive team outcomes.

This is why leadership feels unusually tiring. A people leader is performing three demanding tasks simultaneously:

Delivering Results, Understanding Others, AND Regulating Themselves.

Most roles require one or two at a time. Leadership requires all three continuously and it can be exhausting.

Many leaders try to simplify this complexity by treating everyone the same. The intention is fairness and consistency, yet humans do not perform under identical conditions.

How to do it differently

Over time the role becomes lighter when leaders shift what they try to control. The task is not managing behaviour but increasing human understanding and reducing uncertainty. When people understand what matters, how decisions are made, and how you will respond, the emotional noise surrounding work decreases.

In practice, this looks less like motivation and more like clarity:

• Make expectations visible earlier.
  Many difficult conversations do not come from poor performance but from unclear expectations. What feels obvious to a leader is often isn’t to everyone else. Make sure expectations are spoken out loud early and frequently.

• Narrate decisions, not just outcomes.
  People do not need every decision to go their way, but they do need to understand why it didn’t. Explaining trade-offs is vital to building trust.

• Locate problems instead of absorbing them.
  Leaders often become emotional shock absorbers, stepping in to resolve every uncertainty. But clarity grows faster when responsibility sits where the work sits.

• Separate intent from impact in your reactions.
  The instinct to defend, explain or correct immediately is usually an attempt to restore personal credibility and control. Pausing long enough to understand how something was experienced often resolves more than proving what was meant.

• Optimise for predictability over perfection.
  People do not need a flawless leader; they need a consistent one. When others know how you respond to mistakes, pressure and disagreement, they spend less energy managing you and more energy doing the work.

Being a people leader feels difficult because it combines two complex activities: understanding others while also understanding yourself. There is no checklist that removes this complexity. But the weight reduces when leadership shifts from directing effort to creating shared understanding.

Much of what leaders experience as struggle is simply the friction of translating one reality into many human experiences at once.

So, if you occasionally wonder why you became a leader, you’re not failing at the role.

You’re experiencing it.

You announce a strategy, new information appears, and you need to update the plan.
Maybe it’s better not to say anything - after all: what will my team think? Won’t they assume I don’t know what I’m doing?

That fear causes hesitation, softening of messages and delaying updates while you wait for certainty. Sometimes it even feels safer to distance yourself entirely…suggesting the team speak to a more senior leader, HR, or “the business” for answers.

But credibility is not damaged by changing course. It is damaged by two things: silence and passing the buck.

1) Silence: the instinct to wait

Many leaders equate credibility with having certainty. If you communicate an update, it should be right and final.

Yet modern work (and let’s face it, the world) rarely offers us final answers. Waiting for certainty creates a vacuum, and vacuums fill quickly… usually with gossip and speculation.

People don’t pause their interpretation while you gather confidence. They form their own conclusions: something must be wrong, leadership don’t know what they are doing, something else is going on here.

By the time clarity arrives, confidence has already been eroded.

2) Passing the buck: the instinct to deflect

The second reaction is potentially even more damaging to credibility. When unsure, leaders sometimes attribute decisions outward:

“It wasn’t my decision.”
“The board decided.”
“Finance said no.”
“You need to speak to HR.”

Be honest with yourself, have you done this before?

In some cases it may even be true. But by deflecting the decision onto someone else, you undermine your own leadership.

What you communicate is simple: if senior leadership makes the decisions, why wouldn’t I just go around you and ask them?

Your team notices an absence of agency and authority. This results in a breakdown in leadership trust.

The reality is, teams judge credibility less by correctness and more by openness. When explanations evolve with new information, trust increases. Where certainty is impossible, transparency is what matters most.

Saying “what we believed last week is no longer true” strengthens confidence. Your team doesn’t need you to always be right, they need you to communicate.

What to do differently

In the modern workplace, where change and complexity are constant, leadership is less about announcing decisions and more about creating shared understanding and context. Instead of presenting conclusions as fixed, effective leaders make reasoning visible:

• Here’s what we knew then

• Here’s what we know now

• Here’s what we are still working on / don’t yet have clarity on

• Here’s what that changes

• And here’s the decision we are making

A leader rarely loses authority by changing their mind. So when things become unclear, don’t get quieter.

Get clearer.

But after almost two decades inside fast-growth organisations, its become clear that hero cultures don’t build resilience, they undermine it.

Heroics may produce short-term delivery but they also result in long-term business fragility.

Real resilience isn’t about how hard people can work in a crisis. It’s about how well the system performs under stress.

The problem with how we define resilience

Many businesses conflate three things that are not the same:

• Endurance with resilience

• Overworking with commitment

• Firefighting with capability

When resilience is defined as “how much pressure can people absorb” and “what efforts will you go to to solve a problem” you end up designing a workplace that relies on heroic effort rather than reliable, predictable systems. Creating:

• Brittle systems: Where institutional knowledge lives in people’s heads, not in shared processes.

• Leadership bottlenecks: Work flows through a small group of “indispensable” people.

• Silent burnout:Your highest performers keep delivering… until one day they quietly stop. When they burn out or leave, performance collapses.

The Resilience Triangle

One useful way to think about resilience is through three required and interlocking dimensions:

Resilience = Capacity × Capability × Coordination

• Capacity: Do people have time, skills, and energy to respond?

• Capability: Can your systems absorb change and stress without breaking down?

• Coordination: Do teams know how to work together - especially under pressure?

Hero culture over indexes on capacity - asking people to work harder - and neglects capability and coordination. Ultimately reducing resilience rather than strengthening it.

One core thing resilient organisations do differently -

They redefine what success looks like.

Instead of celebrating the individual who “saved the day,” they celebrate teams that make saving the day unnecessary in the first place.

That means valuing:

• the person who simplifies a process nobody notices was broken,

• the team that reduces incidents by redesigning a workflow,

• the manager who spreads knowledge so no role depends on one person,

• the leader who slows down to remove future friction rather than rushing to close today’s issue.

In practice, this looks like:

• recognising system builders, not just firefighters,

• asking in debriefs, “What did we change so this can’t happen again?” rather than “Who handled this well?”

• measuring success by reduced recurrence, not speed of resolution alone.

Over time, this changes behaviour. People stop optimising for personal heroics and start optimising for shared capability and collaboration.

When teams are rewarded for building scalable systems - rather than performing heroic rescues - resilience becomes collective, predictable, and durable.

If you are leading a team or an organisation, ask yourself these questions:

1. If my top performer left tomorrow, what would break?

2. Where am I relying on heroics instead of systems design?

3. Which areas of my team are most at risk under stress?

A deadline slips. The numbers aren’t where they need to be. The strategy isn’t working. Suddenly the stakes feel higher and almost without noticing, you start tightening control.

More decisions are cascaded downwards. Discussions move into closed rooms. Fewer voices are heard, and updates turn into declarations.

It can feel responsible. Decisive. Even protective.

That’s the role of leadership… right?

Wrong.

More often than not, this response creates the very problems leaders are trying to solve. And it never leads to high performance.

Why control is such a powerful default

Our brains are wired to seek certainty, especially in times of threat.

From a neuroleadership perspective, pressure activates the brain’s threat response. When outcomes feel uncertain or personal accountability is high, the nervous system prioritises safety. Control offers the illusion of certainty.

When leaders feel exposed - accountable for results they can’t fully predict (which, lets face it, is most leadership roles today) - narrowing decision-making feels efficient.
There are fewer variables, less risk is perceived and you can move faster.

But here’s the catch: as pressure and stress rise, cognitive capacity shrinks.

Under strain, leaders are more likely to default to familiar patterns, even when those patterns are poorly suited to complex, fast-moving environments.

The hidden cost of control

When leaders default to control during change, something subtle but damaging happens.

People don’t just lose influence, they lose agency. The message people hear (even if unintended) is: “Your role is to comply, not take ownership.”

Psychologically, this triggers resistance:

• disengagement

• risk avoidance

• slower execution

• a lack of accountability.

Ironically, the more leaders try to control outcomes, the more they weaken the very conditions that produce high performance.

A different move: power with, not power over

The alternative isn’t chaos, consensus, or endless debate. It’s co-creation with clarity.

Leaders who resist the pull toward control don’t abdicate authority - they use it differently. They shift from having all the answers to creating the conditions for better ones to emerge.

This is where performance accelerates.

People commit more deeply to decisions they’ve helped shape. They are closer to the work and spot risks earlier. They adapt faster because they understand the why, not just the what.

Co-creation isn’t soft leadership. It’s adaptive leadership.

Here’s a simple reframe leaders can use in real time.

When you feel the urge to tighten control, pause and ask: “What decision am I about to take away from the team and what would happen if I shared it instead?”

Then run a quick check:

• What genuinely needs to be my decision right now?

• What needs context, not control? Where would sharing the thinking unlock better execution?

• Who should be involved before the decision, not after?

This isn’t about slowing down. It’s about preventing drag later.

If all else fails

One of the simplest, lowest effort shifts leaders can make is this: instead of just announcing change, create a short sense-making window.

That might look like:

• a 45-minute/1 hour discussion with key stakeholders before decisions are final

• inviting questions and tensions, not just alignment

• naming what’s fixed and what’s still open

In summary, control may feel fast in the moment but leaders who stop defaulting to control don’t lose authority, they gain something far more powerful: commitment instead of compliance, adaptability instead of dependence, and higher, more sustainable performance.

Yet in reality, time is one of the most expensive and powerful forms of capital - and it’s often invested with less intention than financial spend.

Time reveals strategy (whether you like it or not)

You can tell what a company truly prioritises by looking at where time is spent - especially leadership time.

Not what you say the strategy is, but who leaders spend time with, which decisions they personally involve themselves in, how long decisions take, and how much time is absorbed by internal alignment versus external value creation.

Clean-sheet your calendar

One of the most effective - and confronting - things you can do is clean-sheet your own calendar. Not optimise it but rather rebuild it from first principles.

Ask:

• If we were designing this role today, which meetings would exist?

• Which decisions genuinely require my input?

• Which forums exist because something else isn’t working?

• Where should my time be protected?

Many recurring meetings fail this test. They persist because they always have - not because they are optimal.

Time discipline scales culture

This isn’t just a senior leadership issue. What leaders role model cascades down and over-meeting becomes normalised.

Time discipline is cultural discipline.

The question isn’t whether you’re busy, it’s whether the way you spend your time is compounding value or quietly eroding it.

But I’d argue that this framing misses a crucial point.

This Act isn’t about compliance and restriction. It’s a strong and direct reminder about the conditions organisations need to foster in order to be high performing.

Because most employment law doesn’t exist to make good management harder. It exists to compensate for where management has historically been weak.

Compliance Gaps Are Leadership Gaps

When organisations struggle with employment legislation, it’s rarely because the law itself is unreasonable. More often, it’s because the fundamentals aren’t consistently in place, by this I mean:

• unclear expectations

• inconsistent decision-making

• poorly handled performance issues

• managers avoiding difficult conversations

• reactive, not intentional, workforce design

In environments where these issues exist, regulation certainly feels like a burden.

On the flip-side, high-performing teams already do much of what the Employment Rights Act reinforces. They:

• are clear on roles, standards, and expectations

• treat people consistently and fairly

• address performance issues early, not late

• document decisions because they are deliberate, not defensive

When those conditions exist, legal risk reduces naturally, not because people are being managed cautiously, but because they’re being managed well.

The Act doesn’t demand an unrealistic level of excellence but it does expose where good management is missing.

So, is it time to approach new legislation differently?

Too often, the response to new legislation is to add:

• more policies

• more approvals

• more HR checkpoints

Organisations that treat employment law as a burden often default to defensive behaviours: delaying decisions; over-engineering processes and avoiding accountability.

Those behaviours slow execution and frustrate high performers. Because performance doesn’t come from paperwork and restrictions. It comes from strong leadership practices.

Instead of asking: “How do we stay compliant with the Employment Rights Act?”

A better question is: “What does our reaction to the Employment Rights Act reveal about how our teams are actually being run?”

Ultimately, legislation should be the floor, not the ceiling. So is it time to see the Employment Rights Act as an opportunity?