Are You Building a Business or Feeding Your Ego?

The moment your team stops needing you

Summer officially arrived at our house this week.

My 17-year-old can drive himself now, which means I barely see him unless he’s raiding the refrigerator or asking for money. My 14-year-old still needs transportation, but somehow my mother-in-law has become his personal chauffeur, social coordinator, and apparently best friend.

Every day I look up from my computer and he’s coming and going with his friends. They’re heading to the beach. Getting smoothies. Going to practice. Finding ways to fill every available hour of summer vacation. And somehow Nana seems to be in the middle of all of it.

The funny thing is, if you had asked me six months ago whether I wanted to spend my summer driving teenagers around Orange County, the answer would have been a hard no. I like my work routine and I certainly don’t actually want to spend three hours a day sitting in carpool lines and beach traffic. 

Yet this week I found myself feeling something I couldn’t quite put my finger on…

A little left out.

And a little jealous of the fact that someone else seemed to be getting all of the moments. The more I sat with it, the more I realized it had nothing to do with transportation. It had everything to do with being needed.

Because somewhere deep inside all of us is a desire to feel important in the lives of the people we love. We want to feel useful. We want to feel valuable. We want to know that our presence matters.

The problem is that this same emotional pattern shows up everywhere, especially in business. Most founders say they want freedom. They say they want a business that can run without them and then something interesting happens: the team starts figuring things out and problems get solved and decisions get made without us. The business starts functioning exactly the way we said we wanted it to. And instead of feeling relieved, we feel strangely uncomfortable.

We start inserting ourselves back into conversations that don’t require us. We offer opinions that weren’t requested. We jump into situations that were already being handled. We tell ourselves we’re helping but in many cases we’re actually feeding our ego.

Because being needed feels good. It gives us a sense of significance. But leadership requires us to be very careful here because what feels good for our ego is not always good for the business. One of the biggest transitions a founder has to make is realizing that your job is not to remain indispensable. Your job is to create an organization that no longer depends on your constant involvement. That’s a strange thing to work toward when you’re the person who built it.

The irony is that the businesses we admire most are rarely built around one person. They’re built by leaders who were willing to develop other leaders and to step back long enough for someone else to step up.

The goal of leadership is not to become more important, it’s to create more importance in the people around you.

And sometimes that means sitting with the uncomfortable feeling that comes when the people you’ve invested in no longer need you in the same way they once did.

And while I’m still not volunteering to spend my summer driving a car full of teenage boys to the beach, I might have to admit that watching them need me a little less is a reminder that this season is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.

And maybe that’s true for our businesses, too.