How to know when to lead and when to follow?

Most founders are not actually afraid of failure. They are afraid of losing control. You can see it in the way they insist on being copied in every investor email, sit in on every product meeting, proofread every marketing caption, and approve every hire personally. On the surface it looks like commitment and leadership. Under the surface it is often anxiety dressed up as duty. When founders ask how to know when to lead and when to follow, they usually hope for a clean checklist that tells them exactly what to do. The reality is more complicated. Across Malaysia, Singapore, Riyadh and beyond, the pattern is the same. If you push too hard as a leader, you become the bottleneck and burn out your people. If you hang back too often, you become a spectator in your own company. Many founders respond by clinging to one default. They are always the front person who talks the loudest, or they are always in the background, quietly letting others speak for the company. Both positions are comforting in their own way, and both become expensive over time.

Imagine a small team with fewer than fifteen people. The product is finally working. Revenue is modest but real. For years the founder has been the one selling, pitching, deciding, and investors love her presence. The team trusts her intensity. Eventually she hires a senior head of sales who has more experience and a stronger network in the industry. On paper this should be the point where she learns how to follow. In reality she does the opposite. She insists on joining every client meeting. She jumps in to answer the toughest objections. She edits every pitch deck the night before. Each time she promises herself it is temporary, just until the pipeline stabilises. The outcome is predictable. The senior hire never truly owns the function. The team continues to see the founder as the only voice that matters. The founder herself feels cheated, because she hired help but still carries the same mental load as before. This is what it looks like when you should be following but keep leading anyway. It feels safe, even heroic. In truth it slowly erodes trust, accountability, and scalability.

Following as a founder is not the same as disappearing from the business. It does not mean pretending you lack opinions or expertise. It means choosing, very deliberately, to throw your weight behind someone else’s judgment and letting them be accountable for the results. In practice, it sounds like this: “I hired you because you have run this play more times than I have. Here is the hard line on budget and timelines. Within those boundaries, I am backing your decisions and I will not undercut you in front of the team or clients.” Then you prove it with your behaviour. You resist the urge to interrupt and correct in front of others. You stop sneaking around your senior leader to give their reports conflicting “quick feedback”. You avoid jumping in at the first sign of discomfort and taking over the task yourself. Following well demands ego discipline. It forces you to feel the discomfort of not being the sharpest operator in the room and stay in your seat anyway. It asks you to trade the rush of saving the day for the slower satisfaction of building leaders who can save the day without you.

At the same time, there are moments when delegating is not leadership at all. It is avoidance dressed up as empowerment. This usually shows up when the company is facing a hard, direction setting decision. You might be deciding whether to shut down a product line, whether to part ways with a cofounder, or whether to tell investors the full story about a missed target. During these moments the team waits for someone to speak truthfully about the situation and carry the emotional weight of the decision. That responsibility belongs to you. Knowing when to lead means taking ownership of the calls that define direction, values, and non negotiables. A head of product can manage the roadmap, but only you can decide whether you are building a premium brand or a budget offering. A COO can manage operations, but only you can set the boundary on what behaviour you are willing to tolerate in your culture. Leadership in these situations looks like saying, “Here is what we know, here is what we are worried about, here is the decision I am making and why. If I am wrong, I will own that.” Your team does not need you to dominate every task. They need you to stand up in the moments that shape what the company is and what it refuses to become.

One useful way to sense whether you should be leading or following is to listen carefully to the emotion behind your impulse. If you feel a sharp spike of fear that someone might embarrass you, mess up, or make you “look bad” in front of investors or customers, that is often a sign to pause. Ask yourself whether this decision sits inside a domain you explicitly hired someone to own. If it does, your role might be to set clear constraints, remove obstacles, and then step back. On the other hand, if you feel a heavy weight in your chest and notice that everyone seems to be waiting for someone to take responsibility, that is usually a cue to lead. That heaviness is the cost of authority. You cannot simply push that weight downwards and call it empowerment. You need to step into it, name reality, and make a call that others can organise around. The signals will not always be obvious, and you will misread them at times. The important thing is to notice your patterns. Do you always rush in and take over, or do you habitually hold back and let others carry decisions that really belong to you. The ability to shift gears on purpose is more important than the illusion of getting it right every time.

If you want a practical test, choose one area where you say you want your leaders to take full ownership. It could be hiring, product marketing, or finance. Then review the last five meaningful decisions in that area. Who framed the options. Who decided on the final direction. Who carried the consequences when things went wrong. If your name appears in all three roles, then you are still leading where you claim to be following. No motivational speech about empowerment will change that. You need to shift the behaviour first. Let your head of marketing present their strategy without you inserting extra slides just before the meeting. Allow your finance lead to speak directly to investors during updates. Let your CTO speak about the product roadmap in front of the team or the board without you translating every sentence. It will feel slower and riskier at the start. That is normal. You are retraining your team and yourself to believe that leadership is not the same as always being front and centre.

There is also a deeper identity layer that many founders do not examine. In the early days, it can be attractive to define yourself as the one who never stops, never delegates the toughest calls, and personally carries the company on your back. This story can power you through the seed stage. It becomes toxic when you start hiring people who are genuinely stronger than you in certain domains. If your sense of worth depends on being the most essential person in every room, you will unconsciously sabotage any attempt to follow. You will say you want strong leaders, then quietly undermine them because their competence threatens the image you have built of yourself. You will tell people to own their decisions, then punish them for choosing a path you would not have taken. At some point you must choose whether you want to be irreplaceable or whether you want the company to reach its potential. Those goals rarely align for long.

The ability to know when to lead and when to follow is not just a nice personal trait. It has direct consequences on your burn rate, your hiring strategy, your retention, and even your exit options. Investors can often sense when a founder refuses to trust anyone’s judgment but their own. Senior hires can sense it too. They will either leave for environments where they can truly lead, or they will shrink into obedient operators who simply wait for instructions. Both outcomes limit how far your company can grow. The founders who seem to grow in the healthiest way are the ones who deliberately rewrite their own role. They still lead firmly when it comes to direction, values, and existential risk. They follow confidently when the topic is deep technical judgment, sector expertise, or repeatable execution that others are better positioned to own. They are willing to feel unnecessary in some rooms because they know their real job is to build a company that remains strong even in their absence.

If you are honest with yourself, you probably already know where you are over leading and where you are under leading. That is the place to start. Choose one domain where you will deliberately practice following and one area where you will deliberately step forward and lead more clearly. Tell your team what you are attempting so they can help you stay accountable. You will stumble. You will overcorrect. That is part of the process. What matters is proving to yourself that your identity can handle both positions. Lead when the company needs your courage. Follow when the company needs your humility. The maturity to do both, at the right time, is what separates a founder who only builds a job for themselves from a founder who builds an organisation that can thrive long after they step aside.