Leadership at Scale: Stop Being the Bottleneck, Start Building Decision-Makers
- Darren Emery
- 4 hours ago
- 5 min read
How Growing Organisations Get Stuck When Leaders Stay Small
“Leadership is not about being in charge. It is about taking care of those in your charge.” - Simon Sinek
Why Growing Companies Break
Imagine the A40 into London at rush hour. When there are only a handful of cars, the single roundabout works fine. Drivers are patient, traffic flows, and the town grows. But as more businesses move in and more cars arrive, the same roundabout becomes a bottleneck. Everyone queues. Everyone waits. Horns beep, tempers fray, and the system stalls.
Now picture your organisation. When it was small, you (and perhaps a handful of trusted deputies) could make every key decision. It worked. But as you’ve grown, you’ve probably noticed the same symptoms as the roundabout: bottlenecks, delays, duplicated work, and the creeping frustration of teams who feel they must queue up for permission before moving forward.
This isn’t because your people are incompetent. It’s because your leadership model hasn’t scaled.
Why This Matters for Mid-Sized UK Firms
Research from the Chartered Management Institute shows that poor management costs UK businesses an estimated £84 billion a year in lost productivity. That’s not just an HR statistic - it’s a hard number hitting your margins, your growth trajectory, and ultimately your competitiveness.
In our work with mid-sized UK enterprises, we see the same pattern: organisations hit an inflection point where the leadership style that got them here, won’t get them there. Founders and senior execs remain too close to operational decisions, while middle managers either act as passive conduits or become blockers themselves.
You've seen the result. Slow decisions, disengaged teams, and strategic misalignment. You can hire more people and buy better tools, but until leadership scales, the system itself won’t.
The Shift: From Hero to Host
When an organisation is small, leaders succeed by being heroes. They fix problems, carry knowledge, and make quick calls. But as complexity increases, the heroic model becomes the enemy of performance.
What’s needed is the host model of leadership:
Heroes carry the work themselves.
Hosts create the conditions for others to carry it, align it, and deliver it.
A great dinner host doesn’t cook every dish, pour every drink, or answer every doorbell. They set the tone, create the environment, and let the evening flow. At scale, leaders must do the same.
The Consequences of Clinging to Control
If leaders fail to adapt, organisations experience:
Decision bottlenecks: everything piles up on a handful of leaders’ desks.
Performance theatre: teams look busy but spend more energy preparing decks and chasing sign-off than solving problems.
Attrition of talent: your best people leave because they’re not trusted to use their judgement.
Opportunity decay: by the time approval is granted, the window to act has already closed.
It’s the equivalent of having a Premier League team where the manager insists on taking every free kick, corner, and penalty themselves. Unsurprisingly, the team stops playing to win and starts playing not to lose.
Decentralised Decision-Making in Practice
Let me be clear: decentralisation isn’t abdication. It’s not a free-for-all. It’s a deliberate design of who decides what, at which level, with what guardrails.
At Agilicist, we help firms design this shift using three guiding principles:
Clarity of intent – senior leaders set the “why” and “what good looks like.”
Boundaries of authority – teams know the scope of their decision rights, and when to escalate.
Feedback and learning loops – decisions are tested, reviewed, and refined, not locked in stone.
In the RAF, pilots are trained to understand commander’s intent. If radio comms fail, they still know the objective, the acceptable risk, and the decision boundaries. They act, rather than freeze. It’s one reason the RAF is known globally for punching above its weight - clarity and empowerment. Business is no different.
A Practical Task: The 5-Minute Leadership Audit
Here’s a simple exercise we use with clients. Try it out this week:
List the last 10 decisions you personally made in the past fortnight.
Which of those could have been made effectively by someone closer to the work, if they had clear intent and authority?
Categorise them:
Strategic (directional, long-term impact)
Tactical (medium-term, delivery-related)
Operational (day-to-day execution)
Count the ratio.
If more than half are operational, you’re operating as a bottleneck.
Choose one decision type to delegate.
Write down the decision boundaries (e.g. budget threshold, risk appetite, time horizon).
Share the intent with the relevant leader or team.
Review after 2 weeks.
What happened? Were decisions better, worse, or simply faster? What can be adjusted?
Most leaders find that once they let go of a few operational calls, they never want them back. And teams gain energy from owning their outcomes.
A Statistic to Anchor the Point
According to McKinsey, companies that make decisions faster are twice as likely to outperform their peers financially. Speed doesn’t guarantee perfection - but it guarantees learning, and learning beats hesitation every time.
Linking Back to Organisational Performance
When leadership scales, the whole system shifts:
Teams stop waiting and start acting.
Middle managers move from gatekeepers to enablers.
Senior leaders regain the space to focus on true strategy.
Performance improves not because you’ve pushed harder, but because you’ve designed the system to flow.
Where to Go Next
If this resonates, you may also find value in these articles from our series:
“Strategy Is Not a Backlog” - why conflating delivery lists with strategy kills focus.
“Backlog as a Crime Scene” - how to diagnose organisational dysfunction by looking at your backlog.
“The Portfolio Fallacy” - why scaling work is easier than scaling focus.
Each connects back to the same core truth: organisational performance isn’t about adding more processes, but about creating clarity, flow, and alignment.
Final Word
Leadership at scale is about letting go of the right things. The roundabout that once worked now needs traffic lights, bypasses, and alternate routes. Your job isn’t to drive every car. It’s to design the system so that traffic keeps moving, safely and swiftly.
And remember: the organisations that thrive aren’t the ones with the busiest leaders. They’re the ones with the clearest intent, the widest bandwidth for decision-making, and the courage to trust their people.
Because the real test of leadership is not how much you can control - but how much you can enable.
