Inside Leadership

A firm owner I worked with had eight capable people on his team. He was still working sixty-hour weeks.

He'd hired well, and everyone on that team could do the work, but every decision still came back to him. Every question landed on his desk; projects tended to stall at the same point, waiting for...

There is a principle in architecture that anyone who has spent time designing spaces eventually internalizes so deeply that it becomes impossible to unsee. Structure shapes behavior before anyone makes a deliberate choice.

Think about how a well-designed hospital moves people through it. Patients f...

One of the more frustrating experiences in running a growing firm is watching someone you know is capable consistently fall short of what the moment requires. You hired them because you saw something. You've invested in them. You believe they have more range than they're showing.

And yet the perfor...

At some point in the life of most growing firms, an owner looks at someone on their team, someone they hired, invested in, or genuinely believe is capable, and thinks: I don't understand why this isn't working better. The person shows up and does their job, but there's a gap between what they're con...

Most owners of growing firms eventually arrive at the same uncomfortable realization. The team is genuinely capable, and yet the owner is still in the middle of everything. She is still the one who catches what falls through the cracks, gets called when something goes sideways, or can't quite step b...