By Graham Mitchell, Business Coach, Author and Founder of Grow
Most leaders will never hear the one piece of feedback that would change how their business performs. Their teams have already decided it isn’t worth the risk.
When the business stops moving forward
There is often a point in the growth of a business where progress plateaus. Not only that, but everything starts to feel harder. The same issues keep resurfacing in different forms: missed deadlines, friction in the leadership team, inconsistent execution.
So, the leader looks outward: is it a tough market, the wrong strategy, a weak team? It is rarely any of these. Frequently it is not any of these, it’s the leader.
The trap that success builds
This is seldom the place a leader looks. Most entrepreneurial leaders have built their success on conviction: backing their judgement, trusting their instincts and pushing through resistance. Those traits are not just useful; they are often essential in building a business. But over time, the very behaviours that drove growth can become the ones that limit it.
When things are working, results reinforce behaviour. Decisions that worked become default approaches. The leader grows in confidence that their way of doing things works. But approaches that worked in one context do not necessarily work when the context changes.
The founder who personally secured early clients may still default to being the dealmaker, even when the business now requires a scalable sales capability. The leader who drove speed through decisive action may unintentionally crowd out input, slowing the organisation in a different way.
Success is a poor teacher of self-awareness.
Few leaders stop to assess how they might be contributing to the frustrations being experienced. This is compounded by the fact that the more successful a leader becomes, the less honest feedback they tend to receive. People assume the leader must be right. They filter what they say accordingly.
And then there is something more subtle.
The accidental diminisher
Many leaders unknowingly operate as what Liz Wiseman describes in her book Multipliers as “diminishers”, not through intention, but through habit. They jump in with answers too quickly. They close down debate in the name of efficiency. They rescue rather than stretch their team. They drive for pace, but at the cost of ownership.
Wiseman’s research found that the average manager uses only 66% of the capability available within their team. Leaders who operate as diminishers get roughly half the output of those who do not.
The effect is predictable. The leader believes they are driving performance. In reality, they are limiting it.
A pattern most businesses will recognise
We worked with an entrepreneur who ran a successful software business. He was deeply committed to his customers and took pride in solving their problems personally. When something went wrong, he would step in, fix the issue and leave the client reassured. From the outside, this looked like exceptional service.
But what happened next was more telling. He would return to the office energised, often with new ideas or insights from the customer interaction, and immediately redirect his team. Priorities would shift. Work already in progress would be paused or abandoned. The team would scramble to respond.
Then, a few days later, it would happen again. The business was busy. The team was working hard. But very little was moving forward in a consistent way.
The leader believed he was adding value: staying close to customers, driving urgency, ensuring quality. In reality, he was creating instability. His need to rescue and direct meant the team never developed the capability or confidence to solve problems themselves. Execution became reactive rather than deliberate.
The cost of unexamined leadership
Leaders are often unaware that their energy and conviction, so valuable in certain situations, can overpower the very people they rely on. The result is that capability around them contracts rather than expands. Decisions bottleneck around the leader. People become more dependent, more cautious and less willing to take initiative.
In the South African context, this problem is pronounced. Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workplace report found that employee engagement across Sub-Saharan Africa sits at just 20%, with three-quarters of workers either watching for or actively seeking a new job. South Africa already faces a well-documented exodus of skilled professionals. Leaders who erode the ownership and initiative of the talent they do retain are compounding a problem they cannot afford to ignore.
The uncomfortable truth is that most teams will not tell the leader this directly.
Why feedback is so rare and so important
This is why feedback matters, and why it is so rare.
Many leaders will never truly seek it. And many who receive it do not use it. They filter it, debate it or explain it away. The result is that the underlying leadership behaviour holding the organisation back does not shift.
So, the team adapts. They work around the behaviour. They compensate where they can. In some cases, strong people leave. In others, they stay but disengage. The business continues to function, but below its potential.
And the leader remains convinced that the issue lies elsewhere.
A different kind of leader
Some leaders respond differently. Rather than filtering or explaining away uncomfortable perspectives, they actively seek them out and then change as a result.
When they do, the effect on the team is tangible. Capability expands, people step up, ownership increases and decisions move faster, not because the leader is pushing harder, but because others are now pulling their weight.
In our experience, one or two behavioural changes, sustained over time, can produce real performance improvements in a business. The starting point is a leader willing to hear difficult feedback and disciplined enough to act on it.
The hardest leadership skill
One of the most underrated leadership capabilities is the willingness to hear something uncomfortable about yourself, and then change your behaviour as a result.
It sounds simple. It is not.
It requires a level of honesty that cuts against how most leaders have been conditioned to operate. It requires letting go of the idea that you already have the answers. It requires recognising that your impact on the business is shaped not just by what you do, but by how you show up.
So, ask yourself. When last did someone tell you something about your leadership that made you uncomfortable? And what did you do with it?
Graham Mitchell is a Chartered Accountant and the founder of Grow, one of South Africa’s leading business growth coaching firms. He is the author of Compounding Advantage and has spent more than a decade working with South African businesses, helping leadership teams build strategy, sharpen execution and scale sustainably.
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