How I learned what leadership really means

In the early days, I thought leadership was about clarity. Clarity of vision, clarity of strategy, clarity in communication. I believed that if I could explain the mission well enough, outline the roadmap confidently enough, and hold everyone to a high enough bar, the team would follow, execute, and thrive. What I didn’t realize was that the moments where leadership matters most often come wrapped in ambiguity—not clarity. They show up not as bold declarations but as quiet, inconvenient choices. And the hardest part is, those choices usually have no applause attached.

I remember a phase during my second year working with a founder team in Singapore. The company had just raised a modest seed round, and with it came the surge of excitement, expectation, and an unspoken fear that now, finally, we were supposed to behave like a “real” company. Processes were introduced. Goals were set. Weekly standups became more formal. The founder, who until that point had been an energetic, deeply involved product builder, started taking more meetings, pitching partnerships, and obsessing over runway projections. It looked like scaling. It felt like growth. But behind the scenes, something was fraying.

That fray began, as it often does, in places no dashboard measures. People stopped asking questions in meetings. Confusion around ownership crept in. Morale dipped subtly, not in the dramatic “we’re all burning out” way, but in the softer ways: missed deadlines, polite disengagement, work that was “done” but not thoughtful. It took a while to realize that the team wasn’t underperforming because they lacked skill or care. They were unsure of their role. And more crucially, they were unsure who really owned what.

What I saw then—but didn’t yet know how to articulate—was the first invisible failure of leadership. Not a failure of effort or intention, but of structure. The founder, in an effort to maintain velocity and protect the team from external pressure, had become the final reviewer of everything: design, copy, investor updates, customer feedback. Not because he didn’t trust the team, but because “it’s just faster if I do it.” That phrase, so common among early-stage founders, is the silent trap. Because while it may feel faster in the moment, it seeds doubt, dependency, and bottlenecks.

This wasn’t about micromanagement in the traditional sense. It was about emotional centrality. The team didn’t lack instructions—they lacked autonomy. And autonomy, I’ve come to believe, is the most fragile currency in a startup. Once lost, it’s hard to rebuild. The founder’s energy had become the system. Remove him, and the system paused. It wasn’t that people didn’t know what to do. It’s that they didn’t believe they were allowed to decide.

Over the years, I’ve seen this pattern repeat itself across founder teams in the UAE, Malaysia, and Taiwan. It doesn’t matter whether the team is five people or fifty. It begins with the founder’s best intentions: be present, be supportive, be in the trenches. But when presence becomes prerequisite, leadership mutates into a bottleneck. And the team becomes built around your involvement, not around capability.

Good leadership, I’ve come to learn, is less about showing up and more about designing systems that don’t depend on you to function. That doesn’t mean absence. It means clarity. Clarity of roles, clarity of decision-making thresholds, clarity of escalation. When those things are fuzzy, teams default to safety. And safety, in early-stage companies, often means: wait for the founder.

In one particular case, I was advising a growing startup in Dubai with a strong technical founder who’d just started building out a cross-functional operations team. The team was bright, well-intentioned, and motivated. But during a one-on-one, one of the leads admitted, “I always feel like I need to check with her before finalizing anything—even if I’ve done this at my last company.” That sentence stayed with me. Because it wasn’t about skill or insecurity. It was about permission.

And that’s the quiet thing most leadership books won’t tell you: teams perform not based on their potential, but based on the permissions they feel they have. If your culture rewards checking in over taking ownership, you’ll build a culture of polite paralysis. If your reviews focus on outcomes but your behavior rewards rework and rescues, you’ll build a team of people who do 80% and wait.

The hardest shift for many early-stage founders is letting go of control without letting go of care. It requires a fundamental shift in how you measure your value. In the beginning, your value is what you build, what you fix, what you catch. As your team grows, your value becomes what runs well without your direct involvement. That’s a hard identity shift. Because many founders build their confidence through competence. And stepping back can feel like abandoning quality. But it’s not. It’s multiplying it.

A turning point in my own understanding of leadership came not from theory, but from a quiet moment during a founder retreat I helped facilitate in Johor. One of the founders, exhausted from a year of growth and constant hiring, looked around and said, “I’m afraid if I stop, things will fall apart.” No one laughed. No one reassured him. We all knew that feeling. And I remember replying, “Then maybe what you’ve built isn’t a team. It’s a relay race, and you’re the only one holding the baton.”

That’s when it clicked. Good leadership isn’t about momentum. It’s about repeatability. If you leave for two weeks and your team stalls, that’s not a sign of your indispensability. That’s a sign of system fragility. And fragility doesn’t scale. What scales is clarity.

Clarity doesn’t mean documentation. It means expectations that are understood, agreed upon, and aligned to outcomes—not tasks. It means people know what success looks like, what they’re allowed to own, and when they should ask for support. It means the founder doesn’t need to say “yes” for something to move forward—and doesn’t need to fix it if it goes slightly off course.

One of the tools I now encourage every founder team to use is the “70% trust rule.” If someone can deliver a result 70% as well as you, let them do it. Then use your energy to coach, not correct. The goal isn’t perfection. It’s ownership. Because ownership compounds. Correction stalls.

I also ask founders to run a simple diagnostic every quarter: write down every decision that still flows through them. Then ask two questions: should this decision live here, and does someone else believe they own it? If not, that’s the design problem—not the team.

What makes a good leader, especially in the messy, ambiguous early stages, isn’t charisma or vision. It’s pattern recognition. It’s seeing where things slow down and asking: is this about ability—or clarity? Is this a performance gap—or a system dependency? It’s noticing that your team avoids certain tasks and wondering: are they disengaged—or disempowered?

I’ve learned to listen to silence more than complaints. When people stop raising issues, it doesn’t mean things are working. It often means they don’t think it will change. And that’s a leadership signal too.

If I could offer one line to my earlier self—the one who thought staying late and “just doing it myself” was helping—it would be this: you’re not building a company, you’re building a system. And if that system depends on your speed, it’s not scalable. If it depends on your personality, it’s not repeatable. And if it depends on your presence, it’s not leadership. It’s dependency.

The good leaders I’ve worked with over the years don’t move fast and break things. They move with intention and design things that hold. They don’t chase every task—they define what only they should do, and ensure the rest can run without firefighting. They are not the smartest in the room. They are the clearest. And that clarity frees up others to lead.

Looking back, the founders who truly grew their companies weren’t the ones with the strongest vision. They were the ones willing to evolve their role. To become less central. To become less emotionally reactive. To trust structures over adrenaline. And to stop measuring their value by how much they could absorb.

Because leadership isn’t about being essential. It’s about building something that isn’t.

And that’s the part nobody tells you when you start. Leadership doesn’t feel like leading. It feels like letting go. Quietly. Repeatedly. With grace.

And if you’re still holding on to every task, firefighting every detail, and convincing yourself that you’re the only one who can keep things afloat—ask yourself this: is your team depending on your leadership, or just your availability?

That’s the difference.

And it’s the difference that defines whether you scale—or stall.