The founder's drive and high standards created an unintended dynamic. The team felt intimidated taking on tasks they believed the founder would do better. There was no clear framework for which decisions required founder input versus team authority. Hero leadership proved hard to avoid when the leader was genuinely extraordinary - but still only one person.

The 360 interviews revealed the real frustration. The team wanted to step up but questioned whether they could match their leader's standards. Over several months, we took a dual approach: workshops with psychometric testing where the team explored their individual strengths, combined with creating decision making frameworks and clarity around roles.

The workshops surfaced courageous conversations about communication styles and their impact on the team. The founder received honest feedback on their leadership style and began delegating and trusting more. The team built confidence to own decisions, created clearer frameworks for strategic versus operational matters, and made behavioural commitments to function independently.

The shifts were tangible. The leadership team made decisions independently, meetings became focused with clear authority, and team members initiated work they'd previously deferred. The organisation unlocked capacity previously constrained by single person decision making.

The real challenge proved more complex than process design. It required examining how the team viewed themselves relative to their leader. The solution wasn't fixing systems but helping the team discover they were more capable than they'd believed, whilst enabling the founder to trust both their own leadership and their team's capabilities.