The business might have twelve employees now, but the founder still gets asked whether a £150 refund is OK.
A supplier changes its terms and somebody forwards the email to them. A customer complains and the account manager asks how they want it handled. A member of staff wants Friday off and their manager checks first.
None of these decisions is especially difficult. That is partly why they are easy to overlook.
The founder answers quickly, everyone gets on with their day and nothing appears to be wrong. Then the same thing happens tomorrow.
For owners who have built a company from scratch, this can become a surprisingly stubborn part of growth. They may have hired good people and promoted managers, yet growing businesses need more leaders, as a large amount of everyday decision-making still ends up with them.
Notice What Happens When You Are Unavailable
A founder who spends a normal working day away from the business gets a fairly good view of how much still depends on them.
Perhaps there are fourteen WhatsApp messages by lunchtime. Two start with “Sorry to bother you”. Someone is waiting for approval before ordering stock. A client has been promised an answer once the owner is free.
Sometimes the problem has less to do with the ability of the people involved than with how the company has learned to operate.
An employee makes a decision without asking and the founder changes it. Next time, they check first.
A manager drafts an email, sends it over for approval and gets a rewritten version back. The sensible lesson is to keep sending drafts.
Small interactions like these can train capable people to be cautious. Months later, the owner is frustrated that nobody takes enough responsibility.
The First Management Promotion Is Particularly Awkward
Small businesses tend to promote people they already know well.
A strong salesperson ends up managing three other salespeople. The person who understands the order system better than anyone becomes operations manager. Someone who joined when the company was tiny gradually becomes the person everyone else reports to.
They may deserve the promotion. They may also have had almost no practice at managing people.
Their working day changes quickly.
A colleague who used to sit beside them is now late three mornings in a week, and they have to address it. Somebody misses a target and expects help. Two employees disagree about who caused a mistake. A customer wants an exception to the usual terms. Growing businesses need more leaders to handle these everyday decisions without everything falling back on the founder.
Being excellent at the old job offers only so much help with any of that.
This is one reason an Emerging Leaders Programme can be useful when somebody is moving into management. They get a chance to work through situations that require them to make calls, handle other people and see how their own behaviour affects a group, rather than trying to pick it all up between meetings.
Founders Can Make Themselves Too Easy to Ask
There is another side to this.
Owners often answer questions because answering is faster.
A manager asks whether a customer should receive a refund. The founder already knows the history, so they say yes.
Problem solved in thirty seconds.
Except the manager has learned almost nothing that helps when the next refund request arrives.
It can be more useful to ask what they were planning to do and hear the reasoning first.
Maybe they have spotted something the founder has missed. Maybe they have reached a poor conclusion for a perfectly understandable reason. Perhaps they simply want reassurance because they have never been allowed to make that kind of call before.
That conversation takes a few minutes longer. The next one may not need to happen.
Be Specific about What Managers Can Decide
Vague permission creates problems here.
Telling somebody to “take more ownership” does not tell them whether they can give a customer £200 back, change a supplier or approve overtime.
Founders usually carry dozens of unwritten rules in their heads because they have been making these decisions for years. New managers do not have access to those rules unless somebody explains them.
A customer service manager might be allowed to settle complaints up to a certain value. An operations manager might be free to change suppliers within an agreed budget. A team manager might have control over rotas without needing the owner to check every change. This is why growing businesses need more leaders who can make decisions confidently within clear boundaries.
There will still be occasions when a manager makes a call the founder would have handled differently.
That does not automatically make the call a bad one.
If the customer is happy, the cost is sensible and the decision was within the manager’s authority, rewriting it afterwards may only teach them to seek approval again next time.
A Quieter Day Can Be a Useful Measure of Progress
The effects of stronger management are often quite mundane.
The founder comes out of a three-hour meeting and there are fewer messages waiting.
A customer complaint has already been dealt with.
A manager mentions a problem and follows it immediately with what they have decided to do about it.
An employee who would previously have gone straight to the owner now goes to their manager instead.
For a founder who has spent years being involved in practically everything, those changes can feel slightly strange. Being needed has been part of the job for a long time.
But a company employing twenty people should be able to make more decisions than it could when it employed five.
If adding people only adds more questions to the founder’s phone, the management layer still has some growing to do.
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