By ETJ Life – helping PE-backed CEOs thrive in work and life.
Stop Being the Tiebreaker
There’s a quiet sign that a leadership team has come to depend on you too much: every real decision finds its way back to your desk. Two leaders disagree, and instead of working it out, they wait for you to settle it. It feels like leadership. It’s actually a ceiling.
When a strong CEO becomes the tiebreaker, the team learns to defer upward instead of solving things peer to peer. They stop acting like partners in the business and start acting like functional owners protecting their own turf, each waiting for you to call the play. You end up carrying decisions that were never supposed to be yours, and the team never builds the muscle to carry them instead.
The fix starts with who writes the rules. Operating principles only govern a team when the team writes them. Hand your principles down from the top and every gap becomes your problem to enforce. Have your leaders draft them together, say them out loud, and put their names on them, and something changes. Now they own the standard, and they hold each other to it. Their fingerprints are on it, so it’s theirs to protect.
Then judge them together, not on separate scorecards. When two leaders keep pointing fingers, put them on the same page, literally. One of them can’t be winning while the other is losing on a shared goal. Have them build one plan together, present it together, and review it together, with no side conversations that route back through you. Shared accountability turns rivals into partners, and it takes you out of the middle.
Sometimes the Best Move Is No Move
Most CEOs have a default setting that says every problem needs an action, and it needs one now. But one of the highest-skill moves in the seat is knowing when to do nothing on purpose.
When you step back and let a little messiness play out, the team reveals itself. You find out who steps up, who solves, and who was quietly waiting for you to do it for them. Jump in too fast and you never get that information, and you teach everyone that the fastest way to solve a problem is to bring it to you. Give it room and the team grows into the space you leave.
It will feel uncomfortable, and that discomfort is the point. It’s the same burn you feel doing the exercise you’ve been skipping. Resisting the urge to grab the wheel is a workout, and the strain means it’s working. The goal isn’t to care less. It’s to lead first and do second, so your energy goes into building the team rather than covering for it.
You can’t heroically move a business of any real size by yourself, and trying only wears you down. The leaders who scale are the ones who build a team that doesn’t wait for them, then trust it enough to let it run.
ETJ Life is a community for CEOs in the Performance season. This perspective reflects ongoing member interactions and real leadership challenges in the seat.