Sometimes a business doesn’t need fixing. It needs rethinking. I’ve seen it in my own companies. I’ve seen it with clients. Growth stalls, not because something’s broken, but because the business can’t adapt quickly enough to seize the next opportunity.
We’ve been told growth is everything. Promotions, development plans, stretch goals. But what if some of your best people… don’t want any of that? Here’s a leadership truth most won’t say out loud: Not everyone wants to lead. Or scale. Or climb.
In the early days of building a business, most of us don’t need formal help, we’re too busy doing everything ourselves. But as growth kicks in, so does complexity. And that’s when founders can hit a wall.
By building sustainability into job descriptions, development plans, and even career pathways, you are embedding sustainability into the core of your business without having to make additional effort or assign a specific role.
We expect a lot from mid-level leaders. They’re translators of vision and executors of strategy. And unlike senior leaders, they often don’t have coaches, safe spaces, or even enough autonomy to change what’s hurting them.
If you’re leading a business and thinking about future investment, acquisition, or even just long-term sustainability, ask yourself the same question I ask:
“Would I invest in this business if I didn’t own it?”
One of the biggest shifts I’ve made across my companies is building space for deliberately “stupid” ideas, the kind that make sensible people roll their eyes… and sometimes change the whole direction of the business.
No one tells you about this part of growing people. The part where the thing you always said you wanted – to develop great leaders – actually happens. And suddenly, you’re not the smartest, most capable, most experienced person in the room anymore.
Confidence can often be mistaken for clarity, but when leaders stop testing their thinking, they stop growing. Confirmation bias, the tendency to favour information that supports what we already believe, is a quiet, credible saboteur.
The business life cycle is real. It doesn’t wait for comfort, it doesn’t slow down for capability gaps, it keeps evolving. The job of the founder, its directors and leaders is to notice what the business needs next
Recent Comments