When the Business Can’t Function Without You, That’s Not Leadership — It’s a Signal
Imagine a founder switches off her phone and disappears for four weeks. No slack messages, no calls, no “quick approval.” In a healthy company, this should be uneventful — projects move, customers stay, deals close. In many small and mid-sized businesses, though, something quietly breaks: a decision stalls, a key client asks where she went, a sales conversation goes cold. The team isn’t incompetent. The business has simply never been asked to run without her, and it turns out large parts of it can’t.