I spent most of my life being the person with the answers for a variety of reasons. I am now 51 and every year that goes by I am quite sure I ‘know’ less.
Sales, nursing, emergency medicine, building and scaling a business, every role rewarded me for knowing. For being quick witted and being able to intuit the problem and start offering solutions. And I was good at it.
I started working with founders and entrepreneurs as a mentor for many years via the European Institute of Technology, NHS Clinical Entrepreneurs program and informally, I did what felt natural and what people ask for in a mentor. I walked in, listened for twenty minutes, identified the three things that were broken, and offered solutions to the issues and/or connections in my network who could help.
The problem with knowing
What I have learned is that when you give someone the answer, they hold it loosely. It’s yours, not theirs and they may, or may not action it. But either way, it doesn’t land in the same place as something they discovered for themselves.
The most powerful thing I have learnt in a room full of smart, driven founders wasn’t having the sharpest insight. It was learning to shut up and ask a better question.
I don’t mean a coaching-school question designed to simply reflect back the problem. I mean a genuinely curious one. Like: Do you think it is enough to say that your business is better at X or are you able to say that you are the only X that do Y? Questions like that can shift peoples thinking and really challenge what value your service or product brings to the market and how you differentiate yourself in the market. It shifts a conversation about tactics into one about value.
Why founders struggle with this
Founders are wired differently, I do not think that is an egoic or narcissistic thing, although it is easy to get lost in that. But they are compelled to build something from nothing by ‘knowing’ for all kinds of different reasons. They are often decisive, instinctive and believing they have answers when nobody else does and being willing to change their minds and own that when they discover it is wrong. It is a way of working built out of necessity but it has to evolve.
At some point, knowing becomes the ceiling. The business outgrows the founder’s ability to hold all the answers. The team stops thinking for themselves because the boss always has a view. The culture quietly shifts from “we figure it out together” to “we wait for the founder to tell us.”
And the founder feels it. They can’t always articulate it, but they feel the weight of being the only person in the room who’s supposed to know and by then they often have specialists around them who may well know better.
What changes when you stop
I now work with founder-led businesses, and the work I’m most proud of starts with an admission: I don’t know your business and I do not have the answers. You do and if you don’t we can figure them out together. What I bring is the ability to ask questions you’re not asking yourselves, pattern recognition, a realistic, practical and joyful approach to strategy (spoiler alert: it is not that complicated) and plenty of energy to inspire you to deliver the true value your business holds.
It’s a discipline to balance advisory, strategy, mentorship and coaching approaches with commercial nouse. That is the offer. My challenge is to not roll my sleeves up and get involved in the doing. What is yours?
The founders I work with don’t need another person with opinions. They need someone who has been round the track, bears the scars to prove it and can walk alongside them.
A question worth sitting with
If you’re a founder or senior leader reading this, here’s the question I’d leave you with: Who do you talk to about the big stuff to when you can’t talk to your team?
I’m Lyndon Johnson, founder of Emergent Services. I work with founder-led businesses to build clarity, capability, and really help you move the dial. If that resonates, I’d welcome a conversation.
