Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Key Takeaways
- Early-stage companies often rely on the founder’s judgment, and for good reason. But as you grow, you have to learn to delegate to give your team the confidence to make decisions without you.
- Don’t just hire people to execute — hire people who genuinely want to learn.
- Give your employees enough trust to surprise you with the way they step up to the plate.
When I started Infragistics, I was used to solving problems myself. That was partly because I had to. We were a small company with limited resources and few people to hand things off to. If a task needed to get done, I did it. If a decision needed to be made, I made it. If something went wrong, I jumped in and fixed it.
Those instincts served me well and helped me build a company from a 10-person startup into a global organization with hundreds of employees across six countries. But eventually, they stopped serving me.
The bigger Infragistics became, the more I realized that being the person with all the answers was actually becoming a limitation. I couldn’t be in every meeting, make every decision or personally solve every problem. More importantly, if I kept doing those things, I was preventing other people from developing the judgment and confidence to do it themselves.
That was one of the hardest transitions of my career. I realized that the skills I had relied on to build the company were not necessarily the skills I needed to lead it. Over 35 years, I’ve had to rethink how I manage, how I develop people and how much control I’m willing to give up. I’ve learned that scaling a company requires a founder to make three fundamental shifts.
1. Stop being the only person with all the answers
Early-stage companies often revolve around the founder’s judgment, and there’s good reason for that. Founders are deeply involved in the product, the customers and the day-to-day business. Decisions get made quickly because they don’t have to travel through layers of approval, and that speed is often a real advantage when trying to get ahead of the competition.
But most founders are also, without realizing it, running a command-and-control organization. The leader sets the direction, makes the decisions and expects the team to execute. It works when the company is small enough to manage directly, but as the company grows, people stop bringing problems forward because they expect to be told what to do anyway. The organization becomes dependent on one person’s judgment at the exact moment it needs to be building more of it. And the founder who was once the engine of the company becomes the bottleneck.
Eventually, a founder’s job is no longer to have the best answer, but to help other people develop the ability to find the best answer. That shift requires moving from command-and-control to coaching. Coaching isn’t about telling people what to do, but about helping people understand why a decision needs to be made and giving them the tools to make better decisions themselves. It builds judgment over time rather than substituting someone else’s. Done consistently, it creates a team that can operate, adapt and lead without the founder in the room.
2. Stop hiring people to execute and start hiring people who want to learn
Most hiring decisions focus on what someone can do right now. Can they handle the role? Do they have the relevant experience? Those are reasonable questions, but as a company grows, the answers become less obvious. Everything from markets and technology to customers can change drastically in the course of a year, and the skills that once made someone an excellent hire may not be the skills the company needs from them down the line. A team built entirely around execution, and around people who are very good at doing what they are told, will struggle to adapt when the ground shifts.
That’s why curiosity matters as much as capability. Leaders who build learning cultures start at the hiring stage. The questions worth asking in an interview are not just about what someone has done, but about how they think and whether they are actively invested in their own growth.
Once those individuals are hired, the other half of the equation is investing in their curiosity. That means giving people a real budget for learning — conferences, courses, advanced degrees — and building development plans that take their growth seriously.
A company cannot stay competitive by relying only on the knowledge it already has, and the founders who scale are the ones who hire for who someone can become, not just what they can do on day one.
3. Give people enough trust to surprise you
Control feels safe, especially when the stakes are high. But a company can’t scale what only one person can manage, and at some point, the need for speed and the need for control become incompatible.
Real delegation requires trust, and trust requires accepting that people will sometimes do things differently than you would. And while different can feel intimidating, it doesn’t mean the approach is worse. Founders who can’t tolerate change or a different way of thinking tend to pull decisions back toward themselves, which trains their teams to stop taking initiative and wait for direction.
Building trust means giving people responsibility before it feels completely comfortable, letting them make decisions and resisting the urge to step in every time the approach differs from your own. At the end of the day it’s not about the path to a goal. What’s most important is that the goal is met.
Trust is also cultivated when leaders model the behavior they want to see. If a leader can’t be challenged, no one else will feel comfortable challenging bad ideas. If a leader cannot admit mistakes, employees will learn to hide theirs. And if people do not feel safe disagreeing, the organization loses some of its best thinking.
The strange paradox of building a company is that the instincts that make a great founder are eventually the same ones that have to be unlearned. The founders who scale aren’t the ones who hold on to control the longest, but are the ones who build people who can think for themselves, create a culture that rewards curiosity and establish enough trust that the organization can make good decisions even when the founder isn’t in the room.
Key Takeaways
- Early-stage companies often rely on the founder’s judgment, and for good reason. But as you grow, you have to learn to delegate to give your team the confidence to make decisions without you.
- Don’t just hire people to execute — hire people who genuinely want to learn.
- Give your employees enough trust to surprise you with the way they step up to the plate.
When I started Infragistics, I was used to solving problems myself. That was partly because I had to. We were a small company with limited resources and few people to hand things off to. If a task needed to get done, I did it. If a decision needed to be made, I made it. If something went wrong, I jumped in and fixed it.
Those instincts served me well and helped me build a company from a 10-person startup into a global organization with hundreds of employees across six countries. But eventually, they stopped serving me.
The bigger Infragistics became, the more I realized that being the person with all the answers was actually becoming a limitation. I couldn’t be in every meeting, make every decision or personally solve every problem. More importantly, if I kept doing those things, I was preventing other people from developing the judgment and confidence to do it themselves.
