Is Your Organization Growing, or Just Becoming More Dependent on You?

Stop Building a Business That Runs Through You

The business is growing. Revenue is increasing, the team is expanding, and new customers are coming through the door. From the outside, everything appears to be moving in the right direction, but inside the organization, the founder’s calendar tells a very different story.

People constantly need decisions, departments struggle to resolve conflicts without executive involvement, and projects sit waiting for direction. The founder is copied on nearly every important email and increasingly finds themselves working evenings just to catch up on the responsibilities they couldn’t address during the day.

For many founders, this feels like part of the responsibility that comes with building a business. They know their customers, understand the strategy, and have spent years developing the judgment that allows them to resolve problems quickly. When something gets stuck, stepping in feels like the responsible thing to do, particularly when they know they can resolve the issue faster than anyone else.

But there’s an important question that often goes unasked: Has the organization actually grown stronger, or has it simply become more dependent on the person leading it?

When organizational performance depends on one individual personally connecting every dot, the business isn’t necessarily scaling. What may actually be growing is the leader’s workload, and eventually, that becomes a constraint on the organization’s ability to move forward.

Although this is a common challenge for founders and business owners, it isn’t exclusively a problem for those sitting at the top of an organization. I experienced something similar during my military career, and it taught me an important lesson about the difference between being helpful and becoming necessary.

When Everyone Starts Coming to You

While serving as the Operations Officer at our national training centre, I occupied a position that required a broad understanding of what was happening across the unit. Operations was central to much of what we did, and my responsibilities involved understanding how different activities, priorities, and people fit together to accomplish the organization’s mission.

In many respects, I was the brain of the unit, and it was perfectly normal for people to come to me seeking advice, direction, or decisions related to our operations. That was part of my responsibility, and I expected to be involved in those conversations.

What I hadn’t anticipated was how frequently people would approach me with matters that had absolutely nothing to do with my responsibilities. Sometimes these were issues that fell entirely within their own areas of authority, yet they still wanted my perspective or direction before moving forward.

One particular interaction with a senior non-commissioned officer stands out because it made me start questioning what was happening.

The individual approached me with a problem that was completely theirs to manage. It wasn’t an Operations issue, and I had no responsibility for making the decision. Nevertheless, I listened to the situation and offered my perspective because I believed it might help them work through the problem.

Before the conversation ended, however, I reinforced that what I had provided was simply my input. The issue remained theirs, as did the responsibility for deciding how to address it. Their reaction seemed to be a mixture of acceptance and surprise, with perhaps some expectation that I would become more involved than I intended.

That interaction stayed with me because it made me wonder why so many people were coming to me with decisions that weren’t mine to make.

I wasn’t the commanding officer, nor was I responsible for every function within the unit. My role required a broad understanding of the organization, but that didn’t automatically give me authority over everything happening within it. Generally, when people approached me with issues outside my responsibilities, I tried to reflect those matters back to the appropriate individuals. If my perspective was useful, I was happy to provide it, but I also made a conscious effort to stay in my lane.

Even today, I can’t say with certainty what motivated them. Perhaps they trusted my judgment, felt more comfortable having someone with a broader organizational perspective involved, or simply found it easier to seek another opinion before making a decision. There may have been different reasons depending on the individual and the situation.

What I began to appreciate, however, was that there’s a significant difference between being someone people trust for advice and becoming someone they depend on for decisions they should be making themselves.

That distinction has implications well beyond the military. In growing businesses, particularly those led by capable and highly involved founders, the same pattern can develop without anyone deliberately creating it. Over time, the executive becomes the person everyone consults, not necessarily because the issue requires executive authority, but because involving that person has become the organization’s normal way of getting things done.

How Good Leadership Can Create Unhealthy Dependencies

During the early stages of building a business, a founder’s direct involvement is often essential. They understand the customers, know the strategy, and possess much of the institutional knowledge that allows the organization to make decisions quickly. With a relatively small team, having one person connect the various parts of the business can create speed, consistency, and a clear sense of direction.

The challenge emerges when the organization grows but its operating arrangements fail to evolve alongside it.

The founder continues making decisions that managers could reasonably handle, departments seek executive involvement to resolve routine disagreements, and employees become accustomed to asking permission rather than exercising the authority they already possess. What once made the organization efficient can gradually become the very thing slowing it down.

Sometimes leaders contribute to this pattern by continually stepping in, providing answers, and taking responsibility for problems that belong elsewhere. In other cases, as I experienced at the training centre, people begin relying on a trusted individual even when that person is actively trying to keep responsibilities where they belong.

Either way, the organization can develop dependencies around an individual’s availability, knowledge, judgment, and willingness to intervene.

This is particularly challenging because those dependencies often develop around highly capable leaders. People trust them because they have demonstrated sound judgment, understand the broader organization, and consistently help resolve difficult situations. Their competence becomes a reason for others to involve them, even when their involvement isn’t necessary.

Being the fastest person to solve a problem, however, doesn’t automatically mean you should be the person solving it.

This is where leaders need to distinguish between accountability and dependency. You remain accountable for organizational performance even when other people exercise decision-making authority, but that accountability doesn’t require you to personally approve every decision, attend every meeting, or follow up on every commitment.

Instead, it requires clear objectives, defined responsibilities, appropriate oversight, and the ability to identify and address problems before they become serious. Leadership control should come through clarity, visibility, and well-defined authority rather than constant intervention.

When examining how organizations become overly dependent on their leaders, I’ve found it useful to consider four areas where these patterns can emerge.

1. Decision Dependency: When Everyone Needs Your Approval

Decision dependency occurs when people routinely bring decisions to senior leadership that could reasonably be made elsewhere in the organization.

Consider a manager who understands what a customer needs but waits for executive approval to adjust a delivery commitment. Perhaps a project team has identified a sensible way forward but postpones action until someone senior confirms the approach. In another situation, an employee may have both the knowledge and authority to resolve a problem but still seeks reassurance before proceeding.

Individually, these situations may seem relatively insignificant. Collectively, however, they can consume an enormous amount of leadership attention while slowing the organization’s ability to respond.

There’s also a longer-term consequence worth considering. When capable people continually bring decisions upward, they lose opportunities to develop and exercise their own judgment. Some gradually become more comfortable presenting problems than recommendations, while others learn that waiting for approval feels less risky than making a decision themselves.

This brings me back to the experience I had with that senior NCO, because I believe leaders need to understand what someone is actually seeking when they approach them with a problem.

There are three possibilities worth distinguishing.

Advice is when someone wants your perspective but retains responsibility for deciding what to do. Permission is when someone seeks your approval before exercising authority they may already possess. Ownership is when someone expects you to assume responsibility for resolving the issue itself.

These requests can sound remarkably similar during a conversation, yet each calls for a different response.

When someone genuinely needs advice, there’s nothing wrong with providing it. Helping colleagues and subordinate leaders think through difficult situations is an important part of leadership. However, when someone seeks permission they don’t actually require, the more valuable response may be to reinforce their authority and encourage them to exercise it.

Likewise, when someone brings forward a problem that belongs entirely to them, taking ownership simply because you know how to resolve it may be doing them a disservice.

That was the distinction I was trying to maintain at the training centre. I could offer my perspective without becoming responsible for the decision, and I wanted the individual to understand that their authority remained intact regardless of whether they chose to follow my advice.

Of course, this doesn’t mean every decision should be pushed downward. Financial exposure, legal requirements, safety considerations, and significant strategic consequences may legitimately require senior approval. The objective is to ensure that decisions are made at the appropriate level, with boundaries that people understand.

Establishing spending thresholds, acceptable risk limits, and clear escalation criteria gives people a framework within which they can exercise judgment. Just as importantly, leaders need to reinforce that authority through their own behaviour rather than continually taking decisions back.

The leadership question: Which decisions still require my approval that someone else could reasonably make?

2. Information Dependency: When You Become the Organization’s Search Engine

Another form of dependency develops when essential organizational information becomes concentrated around a particular individual.

Some leaders find themselves answering a constant stream of questions about customer commitments, supplier arrangements, project status, or why certain processes were established. They may possess the answers because they’ve been involved in the business longer than anyone else or because important information has accumulated through years of conversations and decisions.

While some of that knowledge legitimately belongs with senior leadership, much of it could be accessible elsewhere if the organization had established reliable ways of capturing and sharing it.

Instead, customer context remains buried in personal email accounts, operational processes exist primarily in someone’s memory, and project information is scattered across documents that only a few people know how to find. Whenever someone needs an answer, the easiest solution is to approach the person who seems to know everything.

Beyond the constant interruptions, this creates a significant organizational vulnerability. If that individual becomes unavailable, changes positions, or leaves the organization, other people may struggle to access the information required to make decisions or maintain operations.

The answer isn’t to document every conversation or introduce an elaborate knowledge management system. In fact, doing so can create more administrative work than the problem warrants.

Instead, identify the information that genuinely matters to continuity and decision-making, then ensure it is accessible to the people who need it. Key customer commitments, essential operational processes, project status, and important responsibilities should not depend entirely on someone’s personal recollection.

Sometimes a shared repository, properly maintained tracker, or consistent handover process is sufficient. Whatever approach you choose, it needs to be simple enough that people will actually use and maintain it.

The leadership question: What information do people repeatedly come to me for that they should already be able to access?

3. Coordination Dependency: When You’re the Only Person Connecting the Dots

As organizations grow, coordination between departments becomes increasingly important, particularly as teams develop more specialized responsibilities.

Sales may make a commitment that Operations hasn’t planned for, Finance and Procurement may disagree about priorities, or a customer issue might move between departments without anyone assuming responsibility for the complete response. Eventually, the problem reaches the executive, who brings the appropriate people together and gets things moving again.

In the moment, that intervention can seem entirely reasonable. The leader has resolved the immediate problem, helped the organization move forward, and prevented further delays.

The difficulty is that nothing may have changed about how those departments work together. When a similar situation occurs, the same people encounter the same coordination problem and once again turn to the executive to resolve it.

Over time, the organization develops an informal operating arrangement in which cross-functional coordination depends on one person’s involvement.

This is particularly common when a business transitions from a small, tightly connected team into a larger organization. In the early stages, people naturally understand much of what their colleagues are doing, and informal conversations are often sufficient to keep everyone aligned. As departments expand, however, responsibilities become more specialized, priorities begin competing, and the need for clear handoffs becomes increasingly important.

Without those arrangements, the executive becomes the unofficial connection point between functions.

The solution isn’t necessarily to introduce another standing meeting or create an additional layer of management. A better starting point is to examine where work repeatedly breaks down between departments and determine whether the responsibilities and decision-making authority at those boundaries are clear.

For example, if Sales and Operations regularly disagree about delivery commitments, the organization needs an agreed approach for checking capacity, determining what can reasonably be promised, and resolving exceptions. Senior leadership may need to establish the boundaries and intervene when significant trade-offs arise, but routine coordination should happen directly between the people responsible for the work.

The goal is to create working relationships and processes that allow departments to collaborate effectively without requiring an executive to personally connect them every time an issue emerges.

The leadership question: Which teams still require me to connect them when they should be coordinating directly?

4. Accountability Dependency: When Nothing Moves Unless You Follow Up

Accountability dependency can be particularly difficult to recognize because, on the surface, it often resembles strong leadership.

The executive follows up on commitments, checks progress, and ensures people are delivering against expectations. Those are legitimate leadership responsibilities, and I would never suggest that leaders should simply stop paying attention to whether work is getting done.

The concern arises when progress depends almost entirely on the leader’s personal attention.

Perhaps deadlines slip without anyone raising concerns, managers wait for reminders before providing updates, or projects suddenly gain momentum whenever the executive asks why nothing has happened. In these situations, the organization may not have an effective accountability process at all. Instead, it has developed a habit of relying on the leader to remember what needs to happen and continually chase the people responsible.

I’ve always believed that leaders need to establish clear expectations and hold people accountable for meeting them. But there’s a significant difference between maintaining oversight and becoming the organization’s primary mechanism for ensuring work gets done.

Your memory should not be the organization’s primary project management system.

When responsibilities are assigned, people should understand who owns the work, what successful completion looks like, and when progress will be reviewed. There should also be a reliable way to identify emerging problems early enough that the organization can respond before they become serious.

This might involve a shared tracker, regular operational reviews, or a straightforward reporting process that highlights commitments, progress, and exceptions. The specific tool matters considerably less than the discipline behind it.

People need to understand that accountability exists whether or not the executive personally requests an update. At the same time, leaders must remain prepared to address missed commitments, provide support where needed, and intervene when performance doesn’t meet expectations.

The objective isn’t to eliminate follow-up. It’s to ensure that accountability is built into how the organization operates rather than depending entirely on one person’s persistence.

The leadership question: What commitments only move forward because I personally follow up?

Why the Same Problems Keep Coming Back

One of the things I’ve come to appreciate through years of leading organizations is that being good at solving problems doesn’t necessarily mean you’re making the organization better. Sometimes it simply means you’re becoming very good at solving the same problems repeatedly.

Consider the customer issue that continually reaches the executive because nobody owns the response across departments, or the routine purchase that requires senior approval because appropriate spending limits haven’t been established. Perhaps a project handoff repeatedly breaks down because responsibilities between teams remain unclear.

Each time, the leader gets involved and resolves the immediate problem, allowing everyone to move forward. Unfortunately, the underlying condition that created the issue remains unchanged, which means there’s a good chance the same problem will eventually return.

Rather than immediately focusing on how to resolve the issue, I believe leaders should ask themselves a different question: “Why does this problem still require me?”

Perhaps decision-making authority is unclear, critical information isn’t readily accessible, or responsibilities overlap between departments. Someone may lack the experience or confidence to act independently, or the organization may have developed an expectation that certain issues always need to reach senior leadership.

It’s also worth considering whether your own behaviour has unintentionally reinforced the dependency. When leaders repeatedly take responsibility for problems that belong elsewhere, they can inadvertently teach people that bringing issues upward is easier than resolving them independently.

Not every recurring problem requires a new process, and sometimes the appropriate response is additional coaching, clearer expectations, or more experience. The important thing is to recognize that repeated executive involvement may be telling you something about how the organization operates.

Resolving the immediate issue gets today’s problem off your desk. Addressing the underlying dependency may prevent the next ten from arriving there in the first place.

Maintaining Visibility Without Becoming the Approval Point

One of the concerns executives understandably have about reducing their direct involvement is the possibility of losing control. If managers begin making decisions independently, how will senior leadership know what’s happening? If departments coordinate directly, how can executives be confident they’re working toward the right priorities?

These are reasonable concerns, particularly when the consequences of a poor decision can affect customers, finances, safety, or organizational reputation.

However, visibility and approval are not the same thing, and organizations need to be deliberate about distinguishing between them.

A manager can make decisions within established boundaries while keeping leadership informed of important outcomes. Departments can coordinate directly and escalate issues when they exceed their authority, while teams can manage their commitments through an agreed operating rhythm that doesn’t depend on constant executive reminders.

The key is establishing what information senior leadership genuinely needs, how that information will be provided, and which circumstances require intervention.

Exception-based reporting, clear escalation thresholds, shared performance measures, and focused management reviews can all help maintain visibility without creating unnecessary approval requirements. The appropriate level of oversight should reflect the consequences of getting something wrong, with higher-risk decisions receiving greater scrutiny than routine matters that can easily be reversed.

It’s also important not to confuse additional systems with better management. Introducing more software, forms, reports, or meetings doesn’t automatically improve organizational performance. Sometimes a simple checklist, spending threshold, clearly identified owner, or shared tracker is all that’s needed to establish a more reliable way of working.

A well-designed organization gives people enough authority to act while ensuring leaders have the visibility required to remain accountable for results. The objective is to keep leadership informed without keeping everyone else waiting.

Take a Hard Look at Your Last Two Weeks

If you’re a founder, business owner, or executive who feels increasingly consumed by the daily demands of running your organization, I wouldn’t recommend beginning with a major restructuring effort or an elaborate process improvement initiative.

Instead, start by examining where your attention has actually gone over the past two working weeks.

Look at the decisions you’ve been asked to make and consider how many genuinely required your authority. Think about the information people repeatedly requested, the disagreements you personally resolved between departments, and the commitments that only seemed to progress after you followed up.

As you review those situations, pay particular attention to the ones that keep recurring. An isolated problem may simply require your attention, but a recurring problem can indicate that something about the organization’s operating arrangements needs to change.

Then consider a question that may be uncomfortable to answer: If I were unavailable for two weeks, what would actually stop?

Some of those dependencies will be entirely appropriate. Strategy, significant risks, major resource decisions, leadership development, and important stakeholder relationships often deserve direct senior attention. Certain responsibilities also require specific authorities, qualifications, or oversight that cannot simply be transferred elsewhere.

The goal isn’t to eliminate every dependency on leadership. It’s to distinguish between those that are necessary and those that exist because the organization has become accustomed to involving you.

Once you’ve identified the unnecessary dependencies, choose one recurring issue that consumes a meaningful amount of your attention and examine why it keeps returning. Perhaps decision-making authority needs clarification, information needs to become more accessible, or responsibilities between departments need to be better defined. In other cases, the solution may involve developing someone’s capability or simply reinforcing that they already possess the authority to act.

Whatever the issue, focus on changing the underlying condition rather than creating another temporary workaround.

You may need to reinforce the change several times, particularly when people have grown comfortable with established ways of working. Organizational habits rarely disappear after a single conversation, and developing confidence in independent decision-making can take time.

But each unnecessary dependency you address creates more capacity for the organization to operate effectively while freeing your attention for the leadership responsibilities that genuinely require it.

Build an Organization That Can Act Without Waiting for You

Think again about the founder whose business continues to grow while their calendar becomes increasingly unmanageable.

Customers are coming in, the team is expanding, and revenue is increasing, yet the founder is spending more time answering questions, approving decisions, coordinating departments, and resolving problems. The organization may look successful from the outside, but its ability to function remains heavily dependent on one person’s involvement.

There’s a difference between building a successful business and building an organization capable of sustaining that success.

The first can happen through extraordinary personal effort, particularly during the early stages of growth. The second requires developing the people, responsibilities, decision-making authority, and operating practices that allow the organization to perform without constant executive intervention.

My experience at the national training centre reminded me that people can begin depending on you even when you haven’t deliberately encouraged it. Being trusted is a privilege, having broad organizational knowledge is an advantage, and being willing to help others is an important part of leadership.

But none of those things means every decision should become yours.

A leader’s value isn’t measured solely by how many decisions require their approval or how many problems they personally solve. It also shows in whether they’ve developed an organization where capable people can exercise sound judgment, coordinate their responsibilities, and deliver results without constantly requiring executive involvement.

The goal isn’t to build an organization that doesn’t need leadership. It’s to build one that doesn’t need the leader involved in everything.

Think about one recurring decision, coordination issue, information request, or accountability problem that continually finds its way back to your desk. Rather than simply resolving it again, consider what would need to change so that the next time it arises, the organization can handle it without you.

That might be some of the most valuable leadership work you do this week.

I’d also be interested in hearing your experience. Where have you seen organizations become unnecessarily dependent on a particular leader, and what helped change that pattern?

If you’re a founder, business owner, or executive who has become the central decision-maker, problem-solver, or coordinator in your organization, a Leadership Clarity Call can be an opportunity to examine where your involvement is helping and where it may be limiting your organization’s ability to move forward.