When it comes down to it, leadership isn’t about strategy, vision, or even the brilliance of your products. Those things matter, of course, but they won’t carry you far without one essential ingredient: people.
Leadership is about people connecting with people.
It’s great if you’ve got a winning strategy and a product your customers love. But the real measure of leadership is how well you can connect with your team, inspire them, and bring out their best.
And this gets harder as your business grows…
The tricky 20-30 headcount point
In my work with scaling businesses, I see the same pattern repeat. Somewhere around the 20-30 people mark, the founder or owner hits a wall. Suddenly, delegation doesn’t come as easily. They once had their arms around everything but now start to struggle to let go.
It’s tough. Technically you’re “the leader,” but really you’re still knee-deep in operations. You’ve simply bolted a bit of leadership onto your operational role. Instead of spending 80% of your time leading and 20% on the day-to-day, you’ve got it the other way round.
And as long as you stay stuck in the weeds, you’ll never give yourself the space to lead properly.
People skills matter more than technical skills
Many businesses tend to promote the best technical performers into management. The problem is that being a brilliant technician doesn’t automatically make you a great leader.
In managing people, your effectiveness depends on your ability to build trust, listen, empathise, and motivate. In other words, people skills.
And yet those skills often get overlooked when businesses decide who’s ready for the next step. The irony is obvious: we end up with managers who are experts in their field but unprepared for the role that really matters – leading people.
Take BrewDog, for example. Their meteoric rise showed the power of vision and marketing – but their culture issues made headlines for the wrong reasons. You can’t scale sustainably on product and hype alone. You have to build a leadership culture that values people as much as ideas.
Two stages of leadership
So how do you navigate leadership in a scaling business? It’s useful to think about it in two stages.
Stage 1: Setup
This is about aligning people behind the vision and strategy. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you must create the vision single-handedly. Some of the strongest visions are co-created with your team. Your role is to connect people with it – to make sure they understand it, feel part of it, and commit to it – and co-creating it is one of the best ways to create commitment.
Remember – a perfectly crafted vision is useless if nobody buys into it.
Stage 2: Execution
This is where you spend most of your time once the vision is clear. It’s all about coaching: helping people perform at their best, encouraging, challenging, and supporting them. Sometimes it’s listening. Sometimes it’s stretching them beyond what they thought they could do. It’s not about doing the work for them – it’s about helping them to succeed in doing it themselves.
You’re not the star player, you’re the coach on the sidelines.
Thought leader vs people leader
There’s a big difference between being a “thought leader” and being a leader of people. A thought leader comes up with ideas, strategies, and clever concepts, but may or may not bring others along.
A leader of people makes the connection. They communicate, inspire, and empower others to bring their best selves to the table.
When Gymshark scaled rapidly, their founder, Ben Francis, had to learn this shift fast. He went from being the “product guy” to being the leader of a global team – not by knowing all the answers, but by building the right leadership culture around him.
Three practical shifts you can make
If you want to step up as a leader of people, not just operations, here are three simple but powerful moves:
- Swap “update” meetings for “coaching” conversations. Instead of running through task lists, use some of the time to ask: What’s getting in your way? What support do you need from me? This builds trust, accountability, and problem-solving skills across the team.
- Delegate outcomes, not tasks. Stop saying, “Do X this way by Friday.” Start saying, “We need Y result – how would you approach it?” It gives your people ownership, and it gives you time back.
- Audit your own time. Track one week of work and split your activities into “leading” vs “doing.” If less than half your time is spent leading, it’s time to reset. Shift even 10% more into leadership activities and you’ll feel the difference.
To scale sustainably, get comfortable stepping away from “doing.” Let go of being the fixer, the answer-giver, the one holding it all together. Instead, learn to be the connector, the coach, and the communicator.
In the end, leadership isn’t about what you build or sell. It’s about the people who help you do it.
As ever, give me a call or drop me a line if you’d like to discuss any of this…