The secret behind every team that scales

Hi Reader, Daria's here.

I was talking with Rachel Sutherland recently — she runs People and Operations at a company of about fifty, growing fast from a startup into a scaleup. And of course, we talked about the transition that comes easy to no leader.

You've heard plenty about the importance of delegation — "hire people smarter than you," the productivity math. But there's a part that makes it genuinely hard, and it isn't logistics. It's an identity shift.

You built something by being close to the work. By being the person everyone came to. Your judgment was the product. Then the company grows, and one day there is simply not enough time — and not enough of you — to be in every decision.

So you start handing decisions to other people. And two fears show up at once. One: what if they're not as good at this as I am? And the harder one: what if they're better at it than I am?

That second fear is the one nobody says out loud. It's also the sign you're doing it right.

Here’s the approach to walk leaders through when they’re in the middle of this.

1. Build a layer you can truly trust. Not a layer that reports to you — a layer you’d put real weight on. This is slow work, and no shortcut survives the growth.

Why it works: trust is the only thing that lets you release a decision without hovering over it, and hovering is what keeps you the bottleneck.

2. Brain-dump your context. All the reasoning living in your head — the history, the unwritten reasons, the “we tried that in 2023 and here’s what happened” — has to come out and get transferred.

Why it works: people can’t make decisions aligned with you if half the map only exists in your memory. As Rachel put it, you have to “brain dump a little bit onto them” so they’re genuinely aligned, not guessing.

3. Set up the process. Decide how decisions get made before you step back from making them — what gets escalated, what doesn’t, what “good” looks like.

Why it works: trust without structure produces confusion on a different level. Without it, Rachel says, decisions come back “nowhere near a decision I would make.”

4. Accept decisions you wouldn’t have made. As long as they serve the business. Not wrong decisions — different ones. Ones that hit the objective by a route you’d never have chosen.

Why it works: this is the step that makes the first three real. It’s also where most leaders reach back and reclaim the work.

That last point is where the whole thing tends to break. Most leaders are ok with delegating a task, but not judgment. They ask to be looped in “just this once,” and then always. And the layer they spent months building doesn’t decide anything.

I see a version of this constantly in my own work. Teams don't struggle because the people are incapable. They struggle because the structure amplifies the wrong behaviors — and a founder who can't release judgment is a structure. You become the bottleneck you're trying to design your way out of. (Read my latest Forbes Council article about this)

So this week, do one thing: stop trying to make every decision. Get clear on the one or two calls that still need you, and hand the rest to your team.

You don't lose the expert role when you do this. You outgrow it — again and again. Your job now is to name the most valuable thing you bring at this stage and let go of the rest.

Rachel described it in our conversation: at a scaling company, you're "constantly reinventing yourself, or working yourself out of a job." That sounds exhausting. It's also freeing. If the version of you that was indispensable last year is redundant now, it means the company grew up around you. That was the goal.

See you next week.

Daria

P.S. Want to know how to hire for that level? Listen to this episode with John Pezoulas on hiring for startups and scaleups.