Why equality in the leadership team speeds up growth

The lopsided table

In many leadership teams the founder's voice weighs the most. That is logical: you started the company, you carry the risk and usually you hold the shares. Whoever holds shares often counts for more, even if nobody says so out loud. Yet someone without shares is sometimes better suited to the task in a certain phase. Think of day-to-day operations, or of people and culture. Often these are colleagues who grew into their role internally: they know the company from the inside and the team trusts them. It is precisely they who feel least heard in the leadership team. The balance of power is lopsided anyway. You are the initiator, of the company and therefore, without noticing, of every agenda item too.

What it costs

The whole team is watching the leadership team. If the leadership team is not aligned, everyone feels it, down to the smallest detail. People then stop putting their best foot forward, because why would you run for a direction that is still disputed at the top. And the team does not accept leadership team behaviour that goes against the core values; it copies it. That is how the speed of the whole company drops, while the founder thinks the leadership team is functioning fine, because there is little disagreement at the table. Little disagreement is rarely a sign of agreement. Usually it is a sign that people have given up.

Five ways to straighten the table

1. Rotate the roles. The chair, the minutes and the timekeeping change every week. If you do not, the founders automatically end up as the chair every time and new leadership team members feel like note takers. Then you do not have a leadership team but an audience.
2. Let others prepare and sit on your hands. That produces far more initiative, but only if you give explicit permission for it and keep watching the lopsided balance. Say it out loud: this is your item, I am listening.
3. One yardstick for everyone. Assess every leadership team member on the same two axes, output and core values, and have that judgement given by colleagues and not just by you. Shares or no shares, the yardstick is the same. How that works with the ABCD quadrant is described in Screening on core values.
4. Share the mission, not just the numbers. Equality only arises when everyone at the table carries the same mission and feels ownership of the whole, not just of their own department. That requires the founder to let go of the mission as a personal possession.
5. Measure it. Ask the whole company anonymously how much trust it has in the leadership team and how the leadership team scores on the core values. Do that as a baseline measurement and again nine months later.

What happens when it is right

When I became interim director of Blauw Gras in 2022, an agency within the group that had bought my own company, I did nothing spectacular. Calm, order and regularity: the same rhythm, the same division of roles, the same conversations. In nine months the team's trust in the leadership team rose by sixty percent, measured with a baseline measurement just before I arrived and a measurement nine months later. The margin followed. It was not personal charm. It was a way of working, and that can be transferred.

What you notice then: there is calm and clarity in the leadership team, roles are clear, everyone delivers and nobody covers for someone else's weaknesses anymore. It feels like a team that is on its way to the final together. Did a company have potential and was the market favourable? Then so far every company I helped grew, as soon as the leadership was right. That is where a growth program at Go Delphi begins: not with the method, but with the table.