When the Work Is No Longer Yours Alone

This post originally appeared in my weekly newsletter, BL&T (Borrowed, Learned, & Thought). Subscribe

Borrowed

“When leaders play the role of decision maker, they not only carry the burden of making the right decision, they also are left to carry it through to completion. With only a select few understanding the real issues, this can be a heavy burden. But when a leader engages the team in making the most vital of decisions, they distribute this load.”

From “Multipliers” by Liz Wiseman [Book]

Learned

As I’ve grown with Barrel’s evolution, I have noticed how easy it is for the agency to start feeling like an extension of you. When something reflects so much of your effort and values, letting go can feel less like a leadership step and more like giving up a piece of yourself. That feeling is subtle but powerful, and it sets the stage for everything that follows.

There comes a point when the work and team are solid, and clients are happy with what they see, yet you still find yourself struggling to really let go. You hand things off and encourage others to take the lead because you believe in them, but you continue to feel responsible for how everything unfolds. You technically delegate, but inside you carry a quiet fear that if you step back too far, something might drift away from your expectations. Before you realize it, you’re still standing close to decisions long after you have assigned them.

This instinct comes from a place of care, which makes it even harder to recognize. You want the work to be great and the experience to be positive, and you know your involvement helps make that happen. Eventually, though, this pattern starts to hold the team back. It creates a ceiling for growth that no one sees at first, not because people lack ability, but because you haven’t given them the space to step forward and shape the work themselves.

This dynamic often becomes cultural. Leaders throughout the organization delegate with good intentions but stay close enough to influence outcomes. Team leads encourage ownership but feel uneasy letting go of the details. Everyone is trying to support the work, yet the organization begins to depend on individual presence rather than on trust, systems, and shared accountability. True, sustainable scale only happens when letting go becomes a collective skill, not something one or two people figure out in isolation.

David Ogilvy understood this long ago. His name built the agency. His reputation shaped its identity. Clients wanted Ogilvy because they believed he was the source of its quality. And yet in Confessions of an Advertising Man, he wrote:

“If you ever find a man who is better than you are, hire him. If necessary, pay him more than you pay yourself.”

These couple of sentences say everything about how he saw leadership. He did not try to maintain control or remain the hero of every story. He built an environment where others could thrive, and the company grew stronger because the work no longer relied on a single individual.

I see a similar shift across many of the founder-led CPG brands we’ve supported. These brands often begin with a powerful origin story in which the founder’s identity shapes the brand’s early personality. In time, though, this closeness can hold the brand back. Eventually, the product needs to be the hero. The team needs to be able to lead. The brand needs room to exist even when the founder is not present to carry it.

Bare Performance Nutrition, or BPN, is a great example. Nick Bare spent years building the brand through his personal journey documented on YouTube, which created a deep connection with customers. But after exploring an exit and returning as CEO, he began shifting the center of gravity. Instead of anchoring the brand around himself, he invested in the athlete team and created space for the product to shine. The athletes brought their own stories. The brand expanded through content and events. The product became integral to all of those stories. Nick still plays a key role, but the brand doesn’t need him to exist.

The best founder-led brands hold on to the conviction that sparked their creation while building a foundation so the product, the team, and the systems can carry the story forward. They create room for contributions that strengthen the brand in ways a single voice never could.

The same holds for an agency. For Barrel to grow as we imagine, I know that it cannot rely on any one person or group of individuals to protect the standard or to shape every decision. The real work is in creating an environment where leadership is shared, where the systems support the work, and where people feel empowered to lead with confidence. When that happens, the organization becomes more resilient, more creative, and better able to become something grounded in the collective rather than the individual.