Why leaders cause chaos to remain relevant

Every Monday at 9, the all hands inched past the one hour mark. New priorities appeared, old ones vanished, and the week became a string of fire drills. I have sat in that chair as a founder in Kuala Lumpur, and I have sat across from it as a mentor in Riyadh and Singapore. At seed, chaos feels like momentum. At Series A, the same chaos becomes drag. The uncomfortable truth is that some leaders keep the mess alive because the mess keeps them at the center. If the room is always on fire, the person holding the hose looks important.

In the early days, you ship by instinct. The founder is the router, the reviewer, the product owner, and the closer. That blur helps you survive. It also trains your nervous system to equate urgency with value. Investors love the hustle story. Team members forgive rough edges because the denominator is tiny and the goal is survival. Scale shifts the denominator. More customers, more staff, more money. The same behavior that once felt heroic now turns into churn, rework, and quiet resentment. When a leader senses that shift, some reach for an old tool. They generate just enough chaos to be unavoidable.

I saw it play out inside a Southeast Asia marketplace that had finally hired strong leads. The founder announced a surprise pricing pivot on a Friday afternoon after a single enterprise call. Product tore up a sprint. Sales promised numbers the product could not meet. Marketing rewrote the launch calendar twice in a week. Monday came, the pivot softened, and the team stared at the wreckage of the previous plan. By Wednesday, the founder was in the trenches again, celebrated for saving the week. On paper, the company had a decisive leader. In reality, the system had no memory and no cadence. The chaos masked a fear that the founder would become ceremonial once the team got good at their jobs.

There are recognizable tells. The leader who announces reorgs without resolving root problems. The sudden creation of special task forces that report only to the top. The habit of moving deadlines by emotion rather than by data. The weekly meeting that starts with ten minutes of wins and then spends fifty on fires. The calendar full of check ins and almost no decisions recorded in writing. The message is consistent. I am relevant because nothing moves without me. It feels like leadership. It is actually dependency.

When you peel it back, the drivers are rarely sinister. They are human. Insecurity that the next stage needs a different profile. A rush that comes from saving the day. A blurred identity where company health and self worth are fused. In Malaysia and Singapore, hierarchy can keep teams from pushing back. In Saudi, deference to founders and family operators can amplify the silence. People will stay polite long after they stop believing. They will hit their targets and still refresh LinkedIn at night. You will not see the churn until it has already started.

The bill arrives in three lines. First, velocity drops because the team is always context switching. Second, quality drops because owners are afraid to stake a position that will be overruled by surprise. Third, trust drops because people learn that stated priorities are soft. You can measure it in slipped sprints, in sales promises that become apologies, in the way managers speak about the roadmap like weather they cannot predict. You can also hear it in the sentence nobody wants to say out loud. He looked at me and said, You are the bottleneck. He was right.

My own moment of clarity landed with a customer loss. A renewal died because we could not deliver the promised integration on time. Not because we lacked talent, but because I had moved the goalposts twice to chase a louder account. The finance lead walked me through the cost of my decisions using one page and three numbers. Burn up. Delivery delay. Staff exit risk. There was no villain in the slide. Just a pattern. I realized I was optimizing for presence rather than progress. That is not leadership. That is stage fright.

Here is the reframing that finally helped me and the founders I work with. Shift from presence to process. Your job is to make important work inevitable without you in the room. That means a written decision log so your team stops replaying old debates. It means a sprint cadence that only breaks for real customers in real distress, not for your latest idea after a flight. It means a stable forum where product, sales, and ops make tradeoffs with facts, and where you stop treating every tradeoff as a personal test of loyalty. When you design for repeatability, you exchange the adrenaline of rescue for the credibility of results.

Shift from urgency to cadence. Crisis energy is addictive. Cadence looks boring. You ship on Wednesdays. You review numbers on Tuesdays. You meet customers on Thursdays. Boring wins at scale. It reduces the surface area for error. It lets mid level leaders practice leadership without begging for attention. In Riyadh, I watched a founder move from random launch days to a two week drumbeat. Revenue flattened for a month. Then the win rate rose as sales finally learned when to promise and when to hold. The founder got fewer hero moments. The company got healthier.

Shift from attention to ownership. In Singapore, a COO taught me a useful line. If two people own it, nobody owns it. Make every important outcome visible with a single directly responsible person. Do not bury that person under committees. Protect them from surprise. If you need to change the plan, change it at the right layer with a clear why and a clear when. Put your signature on fewer tasks and more systems. The team will start bringing you problems as data, not as theater. You will still lead. You will lead by enabling.

None of this means silence. It means intentional noise. Your ideas should enter the system the same way other ideas do. Write them. Score them. Prioritize them openly. If something truly strategic lands, say so and restructure the plan on purpose. People do not need less ambition from you. They need less whiplash. When they see how decisions are made, they will trust the tough calls even when they disagree.

What would I do differently if I were starting again tomorrow in Kuala Lumpur or Jeddah. I would build a decision log on day one. I would fix a sprint rhythm before the first hire. I would create a weekly cross functional tradeoff meeting and stick to its scope. I would commit to a do not disturb window where nobody can drop a new priority into the middle of the cycle unless a named customer is at risk. I would tell the team how to escalate, and I would honor that path instead of rewarding back channel access. I would measure leaders by how little they need me, not by how much. And I would get a coach early, not as a performance patch, but as a mirror.

If you recognize yourself in any of this, you are not broken. You learned to survive in noise. Now you are being asked to build something that survives you. Start with one visible rule. For the next two sprints, no mid cycle changes. See what happens. You will feel irrelevant for a week. Your team will breathe. Then they will move faster without the rebound mistakes. If you struggle to stay out of the way, admit it in public. Let your team see you choosing the system over your reflex. That single act teaches more than any values poster.

There is a sentence that scares many founders, especially in high respect cultures. If I step back, they will think I am less of a leader. The opposite is true. When you step back and the work improves, your authority grows. People trust leaders who make them powerful. Investors trust leaders who make results predictable. Customers trust leaders whose teams keep promises. The story you want told about you three years from now is not that you were everywhere. It is that the company kept its word.

You can still have your hands in product, in sales, in the craft that got you here. Put those hands where they raise the floor, not where they break the plan. Save chaos for the real emergencies. Let relevance come from the systems you steward and the talent you grow. If your culture depends on your presence, it is not culture. It is dependency.

Use the phrase that started this piece with precision. Some leaders create chaos to stay relevant. Do not be one of them. Choose relevance that scales. Choose the kind that does not require a fire to prove you are needed.