Admit It - You Don’t REALLY Know!
As startups evolve, so must leaders. In my career, I’ve worn many hats: founder, regional MD, international GM, and global SVP. From pre-seed concepts to PE-backed rocketships. I’ve helped build businesses from the ground up and led teams across continents. But one of the hardest transitions I’ve faced wasn’t about the product, the market, or the funding - it was about me.
In the early days, startup leadership is extreme-hands-on. You’re in every detail, tweaking the pitch deck at midnight, fiddling with the language in the app, arguing over the formatting of the buy buttons. Everything. You lead through hustle, and presence.
But as a business scales, that model doesn’t. If you try to be everywhere, you’ll end up being nowhere. If everything depends on you, nothing is scalable. And so begins the real challenge: evolving from a builder to an enabler. It’s not easy. But if you want to grow something bigger than yourself, you have to let go of control.
Letting go also means something deeper: being okay with not having all the answers. For many leaders - especially those who grew up in founder-led, high-performance cultures - admitting you don’t know something can feel like weakness.
But it’s not: It’s a SUPERPOWER.
Because if you pretend to know everything, you disempower your team. But when you say, “I don’t know, but let’s figure it out” you create space for shared ownership and problem-solving. I’ve written about this before, but some of my most impactful moments have come not from giving answers, but from asking better questions. That’s the work of a strategic leader: finding the questions and creating a culture where the team is empowered to find the answers.
Scaling a business means scaling yourself - and that’s not just about getting better. It’s about accepting change. You realise that your role is no longer to prove yourself, but to amplify others. The truth is: high-growth companies outgrow their early leaders all the time - not because they weren’t capable, but because they didn’t evolve. They clung to what made them valuable at the start and resisted what was needed at scale. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. And that can lead to failure. And, painfully, I've seen that too.
So here’s what I’ve learned: growth comes when you release control. Trust grows when you admit you don’t know. And real leadership begins when you stop trying to be the hero and start building the team that doesn’t need one.
