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Key Takeaways In a growing company, it’s tempting to stay involved in everything. But the volume makes that impossible. The more important question becomes whether you’ve built a team that can make good decisions without you.
Delegating a decision is much harder than delegating a task. People need room to develop their own judgment. They need to make decisions, learn from the consequences and gradually take on more responsibility.
As the company grows, the most valuable use of a CEO’s time changes. You need to spend more time thinking about where the company should be in three, five or 10 years.
The skills that help you build a company are not always the same skills you need to lead it at scale.
When a company is small, the CEO knows almost everything that is happening. You know the people, the clients and where the biggest opportunities are. You are close to the details, and when something goes wrong, you can usually get involved and help fix it yourself.
I remember that stage of my career clearly. There was a certain comfort in being close to everything. Decisions could be made quickly because the distance between a question and the person making the decision was very short.
Then the company grows, markets expand, teams multiply, new offices open, customers come from different parts of the world. Decisions become larger, the consequences become harder to see immediately, and there are simply more things happening than one person can follow.
That is when I learned one of the harder lessons of leadership: The way you lead a company at one stage of its growth can become a limitation at the next. For a CEO, growth requires a change in role.
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