How Often Do You And Your Leadership Team Come Together?
"I haven't been in the same room as my leadership team since December."
This was the moment in a client call last week when everything clicked into place.
The director I was speaking with had been with her company for 7 years - watching it grow from 5 people to 40+. She'd grown with the business, stepping up at every turn.
But somewhere along the way, something had gone wrong.
Absence rates were climbing. The culture that once made people stay was starting to fracture. The leadership team was spread so thin that they'd stopped meeting altogether.
"We're always a year behind on hiring," she told me. "We're always reacting."
Sound familiar?
Here's what I learned from that conversation:
When you're in hyper-growth mode, you don't just need more people. You need to fundamentally change how you operate.
This director was brilliant - she'd scaled operations across multiple locations, managed complex acquisitions, built teams from scratch. But she was also filling up toilet roll dispensers.
"Would you pay someone your hourly rate to fill toilet rolls?" I asked her.
The pause said everything.
She wasn't alone. The entire leadership team was caught in the same trap - defaulting to the easy, familiar tasks while the strategic work that would actually move the business forward sat undone.
The result? A leadership team running on empty, middle managers overwhelmed without proper development, and a culture starting to crack under pressure.
The fix isn't just hiring more people. It's about getting ruthlessly clear on where senior leaders add value, empowering the next layer to step up, and creating systems that can scale without constant intervention.
Sometimes the biggest barrier to growth isn't external - it's learning to let go of the work that got you here so you can do the work that gets you there.
What's your "toilet roll" task?
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