There’s a moment I’ve seen happen with CEOs countless times: the company has been growing, you’ve built a good team, you have a strategy, you’re working hard, and then suddenly, growth starts to slow.
Naturally, you start looking around…
Do I have the right people?
Is my team moving fast enough?
Is our strategy still right?
Has the market changed?
Do we need better execution?
Those are all fair questions, but there’s another question that is much harder to ask: Am I the one getting in the way?
I know that question is uncomfortable because I’ve had to ask it of myself. As CEOs, we spend so much time thinking about how to grow the company that we sometimes forget the company can only grow as fast as we are willing to grow ourselves. And sometimes, growth requires us to recognize that the role we played in getting the company here may not be the role the company needs from us next.
I’ve had to face that at Rhythm Systems. For years, being CEO was a big part of how I saw myself. I co-founded the company, helped build it, and like a lot of founders, I could have easily assumed that because I started it, I should always be the person leading it day to day.
However, as Rhythm Systems grew, the job of CEO changed, and so did the needs of the company. I realized that the things I’m best at and get the most energy from, working with CEOs, developing ideas, teaching, coaching, and thinking about where the business and our clients need to go next, weren’t necessarily the same things the company needed from its day-to-day CEO. Staying in the seat simply because I was the founder would have meant optimizing around me instead of around what the company needed.
That forced me to ask myself a harder question: Was staying in the CEO seat the best thing for Rhythm, or was I holding onto a role because it had always been mine?
Ultimately, I made the decision to bring Amy Ankrum into the CEO role. That wasn’t about stepping away from Rhythm Systems. It was about recognizing that the company had reached a stage where it needed a different kind of day-to-day leadership—and being secure enough as a founder to make room for it. It also freed me to spend more of my time in the areas where I could have the greatest impact on Rhythm’s next chapter.
Your job as a founder isn’t to protect your title; your job is to do what’s best for the company you’re building.
So when growth slows, yes, look at the strategy, look at the market, look at your team and your execution, but before you assume something around you needs to change, take a hard look in the mirror and ask: What if the next thing that needs to change is me?
This is one of the reasons we created the CEO Leadership Development Assessment. It can be a good lesson in humility, but more importantly, it gives you a chance to step back and take an honest look at how you’re leading today. It can help you see what’s working, where you may have developed blind spots, and where you need to change or let go so you can keep growing into the CEO your company needs next.
Think about what it takes to build a company in the early days. You solve problems, you make decisions quickly, and you jump in when something is broken. You close the important deal, you know the customers, the product, and you probably know how to do almost every job in the company because, at one point, you did.
Those behaviors are incredibly valuable when you’re building, but as the company grows, something has to change. You cannot continue to be the answer to every question or be involved in every important decision, and you cannot keep jumping in to save the day. At some point, being the hero stops helping the company grow and starts slowing everyone down.
I learned this lesson myself. Earlier in my career, I believed that working harder was almost always the answer. If there was a problem, I jumped in. If something wasn’t moving quickly enough, I pushed harder. If the team needed an answer, I gave them one. It felt like leadership, but eventually I realized I was training the organization to wait for me.
That is a dangerous place for a CEO to be because if every road eventually leads back to you, you’ve built a company that can only move as fast as you can, and that means you’ve become the bottleneck.
When a company hits a plateau, CEOs naturally want to diagnose the business.
Ask yourself: When something goes wrong, is my first thought, “Who dropped the ball?” Or is it, “What was my role in this?”
That mindset shift is critical. Accountability starts at the top, and accountability isn’t about taking the blame for everything that happens. It’s about being willing to look at your own behavior before asking everyone else to change theirs.
This is one of the reasons we created the CEO Leadership Development Assessment. It’s ten simple statements, rated from 1—rarely true—to 5—consistently true. Being honest with yourself is the hard part.
Your company is changing fast. Your team is getting bigger, the problems are getting more complex, and what the business needs from you today probably looks very different from what it needed from you a year or two ago. The question is: Are you changing just as fast?
Leadership development isn’t something you do once a year at a retreat. It needs a rhythm, a discipline, and a habit. Do you have a coach, mentor, or peer group that challenges your thinking? Are you regularly learning something that makes you a better CEO? Can you name three specific ways you’ve grown as a leader over the last twelve months?
And here’s an even harder question: Are you actively asking people to tell you where you need to improve? Not just allowing feedback—inviting it. There’s a big difference.
The higher you go in an organization, the harder it becomes to get honest feedback. People naturally become more careful about what they tell the CEO, which means you have to work harder to create an environment where people are willing to tell you the truth. If everyone around you is always telling you that you’re doing great, I wouldn’t automatically take that as good news. I’d get curious.
Because growing as a CEO isn’t only about what you’re learning. It’s also about what you’re willing to stop doing.
So ask yourself: What are you still holding onto that your company has already outgrown? Maybe you’re still closing the biggest deals, approving decisions your executives are ready to own, or jumping into problems because you know you can solve them. Of course you’re good at those things—that’s probably part of how you built the company in the first place. But that doesn’t mean they’re still the highest and best use of you.
Your job as CEO is to keep graduating to bigger problems. If you don’t let go of yesterday’s work, you won’t have the capacity to solve tomorrow’s.
Another question I encourage CEOs to ask is: If I were sitting on my own board, what would I tell myself? Or imagine you’re an investor looking at your company from the outside. What would you see?
Would you see an organization with a strong leadership team that can make decisions and execute without the CEO constantly stepping in? Or would you see a company where too much still depends on one person?
Perspective matters. One of the most important shifts you can make as a CEO is becoming less concerned with being right and more concerned with getting to the right answer. Those are not the same thing. Your company doesn’t need you to win every argument. It needs you to build a team capable of winning without you in every conversation.
When you complete the CEO Leadership Development Assessment, you’ll receive a score between 10 and 50. If you score between 10 and 25, you’ve probably uncovered some meaningful blind spots. That’s useful information; don’t waste it by getting defensive. Find someone - a coach, mentor, peer, or trusted leader who can help you see what you can’t see on your own.
If you score between 26 and 39, you’re likely doing many things well, but this is also where CEOs can quietly become bottlenecks. The company is growing, responsibilities are expanding, and behaviors that worked at one stage may not work at the next.
If you score between 40 and 50, great. Keep going because here’s the thing about leadership development: There is no finish line. The company you want to lead three years from now will require a different version of you than the company you’re leading today. Your score isn’t the destination; it’s just the beginning.
Here’s something powerful you can do with your results, take them to your leadership team and tell them, “Here’s where I scored myself. Here’s one behavior I’m committed to changing this quarter. I want you to hold me accountable.”
Think about the message that sends. You’re no longer telling your leaders they need to grow. You’re showing them what growth looks like. You’re telling them that nobody is above feedback and nobody is finished learning not even the CEO.
This is Think Plan Do® applied to your own leadership. Think honestly about where you are and what you’re doing that may be holding the company back. Plan the one or two specific leadership behaviors you need to change. Then Do the work every week. Measure it. Ask for feedback. Hold yourself accountable.
We track priorities in business as Red, Yellow, and Green. Why wouldn’t we bring that same discipline to becoming better leaders?
If your company isn’t growing at the rate you want, don’t immediately assume you need a new strategy, a better market, or a stronger team. Maybe you do, but before you look everywhere else, look in the mirror.
Ask yourself: What is one thing I need to stop doing so my company can grow?
Notice I didn’t ask what you need to start doing. I asked what you need to stop doing. Maybe that means stepping back from solving every problem, answering every question, or holding onto decisions someone else on your team is ready to own. It might mean resisting the urge to jump in when your team struggles and giving them the space to figure it out. Or maybe it means finally letting go of the work that made you successful five years ago so you have the capacity to lead the company where it needs to go next.
Your next stage of growth probably doesn’t need more of the CEO you were; it needs you to become the CEO your company needs next.
Take the CEO Leadership Development Assessment and answer the questions honestly. Don’t take it to get a good score. Take it to find the one thing that could be holding you, and your company back, and then go work on that.
That’s the journey.