When Growth Outpaces Your Grasp (#272)

The Confident Leader

BOOST YOUR LEADERSHIP IN UNCERTAIN TIMES

A CEO recently told me, “We’ve grown so fast that I don’t know what everyone’s working on anymore, and that’s hard. I used to know every detail.”

“You can’t scale your business and stay in every meeting. Trusting your people is the only way to grow.” — Reid Hoffman

This Week’s Edition

Research from McKinsey shows that organizations that scale quickly often face “coordination drag”—a hidden cost of growth where leaders lose clarity and teams lose alignment. 

Clarify Your Thinking

The CEO built his business with proximity. He knew the people, the problems, the priorities. He wasn’t lamenting the loss of direct control. He was missing connection with his team and the details of the business.

Growth brings scale. Scale introduces leadership distance.

As the top leader, you can no longer sit in every meeting or approve every decision. Nor should you. That’s not the highest and best use of your time.

Some leaders experiencing that shift feel a loss of connectedness to the work. Muscle memory is strong. Even though you trust your team, a voice in your head says, “I should know more. I should be offering more insight.”

Truth bomb: leading at scale isn’t about knowing everything.

It’s about people and resources—ensuring the right systems and rhythms are in place and that the team can get the right things done regardless of whether you’re in the room.

This is leadership leverage.

Old Thinking
If I’m not looped into everything, I’m failing as a leader.

New Thinking
If I’m doing everything, I’m blocking the business. My role is to guide, not grip.

Thoughts Lead to Actions

It can be jarring to feel irrelevant in a business you built. The reality is that you aren’t truly irrelevant. It’s that your relevance is different.

Old relevance is being the hub. New relevance is becoming the guide–the leader of the organization (not the projects).

Focus on new tools, new visibility, and a new understanding of what your team needs from you now.

This shift separates operational founders from strategic CEOs. Here’s how to lead well in this elevated position:

Step 1: Redefine “Knowing”
Stop measuring leadership by how much you touch. Start measuring it by how well your team generates the expected outcomes.

Step 2: Create Strategic Checkpoints
Implement check-ins, not for status updates, but for alignment, insights, and friction points.

Step 3: Coach, Don’t Carry
When your leaders bring you problems, resist the urge to solve them. Strengthen their critical thinking. Have them identify the key issue, source three options, and offer one recommendation—1:3:1.

To do this well, set aside time weekly for strategic thinking. We call it Leadership Thinking Time. Leadership requires margin and time to reflect. Remember, you don’t need to be everywhere (or know everything) to have influence.

Just show up where it matters most and lead decisively when you do.

Boost Your Performance

In this week’s video, I walk through how one CEO shifted from overwhelmed operator to confident strategic leader without sacrificing team connection or execution quality. I’ll show you how we redesigned his leadership rhythm so his team could thrive, and he could lead from the right level.

What’s Your Opinion?

How do you stay meaningfully connected to your team as your business scales?
Send me your thoughts: robin.pou@robinpou.com

If you are going to be a leader, you might as well be a good one. Don’t let doubt count you out. Have a confident week!

Robin Pou, Chief Advisor and Strategist

We live to make bad leadership extinct so forward this newsletter to others who strive to be confident leaders. 

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What is “The Confident Leader”?

During the Covid-19 Pandemic, I began a video series called “Panic or Plan?” It was designed to equip leaders to navigate the doubt they experienced and to rise in the confidence they needed to lead during turbulent times. It took off. I then started this newsletter to equip leaders in the same fashion each week for the doubt that crashes across the bow of their leaderSHIP.