The Leadership Lesson I Had to Unlearn Before I Could Actually Lead
For a long time, I thought being a good leader meant being the best player on the field. The one who closed the big deals. The one everyone came to when something mattered. Turns out that's not leadership. That's just a very expensive bottleneck with a nice title.
Nick Clift
8/5/20263 min read
For a long time, I thought being a good leader meant being the best player on the field. The one who closed the big deals. The one everyone came to when something mattered.
Turns out that's not leadership. That's just a very expensive bottleneck with a nice title.
The hero complex
When I was running sales at DWM, I'd cherry-pick the good deals for myself. If it was a decent-sized client, I wanted my name on the win. I told myself it was because I was simply the best person to close it.
Looking back, it was ego. A bit of a god complex, honestly. I needed to be the hero closing the big deals, because somewhere along the way I'd tied my worth to being indispensable.
It took some coaching to see it clearly. The moment that landed was blunt: I was the VCO. Sales wasn't my job anymore. It was somebody else's baby.
So I stepped out of the way. Properly out. And the strange thing was, once I stopped hoarding the wins, the sales function started performing better than it had with me in the middle of it.
What leadership actually is
I've come to think about it like this: a manager manages, but a leader leads people. A leader's job is to create an environment where people can excel, become the best version of themselves, and want to bring their best work.
That's not a soft, feel-good idea. It's structural. It means you stop being the person everyone routes every decision through, and you start building a business that can run without you standing in the middle of it.
But here's the part people skip: you can't just hand people freedom and call it empowerment. Real ownership only works alongside real clarity.
You can't empower people without clarity
If you can't document and clearly articulate what you actually want to happen, you've got no realistic chance of your team ever meeting your expectations. That's not on them. That's on the leader who never wrote it down.
A lot of MSP owners run on instinct. Years of gut feel, built up so gradually it just happens by osmosis. It feels like leadership. It isn't, really. It's not repeatable. It's not scalable. And it keeps the whole business tethered to whatever's in your head that day.
The businesses that actually grow past their owner are the ones where the standards get written down, taught, and handed over. Not held onto.
Permission to grow, not pressure to perform
The other side of this is how you develop people once you've stopped trying to be the hero for them.
We learned early on that you can't force someone into a bigger role. That never works. What works is showing them the path, educating them on what it actually involves, and giving them the option to try it.
We used to give people a genuine safety net: try the new role, and if it wasn't for you after 90 days, you could go back. No shame in it. No stalled career either. Just an open door.
That combination, a clear path plus a safe way to test it, does more for developing leaders than any amount of pushing people who aren't ready.
Trust still needs teeth
None of this means going soft. Creating an environment for people to excel doesn't mean letting standards slide.
You still need to hold people accountable to their numbers. You can't let it slide, because the moment you do, accountability stops meaning anything for everyone else watching.
The best version of this I've seen isn't top-down accountability, it's collective improvement. If you've got fifty people and each of them brings one improvement to the table every week, that's potentially 2,500 things getting better in your business that you never would have thought of on your own.
Ultimately, we're not in business to be the hero. We're in it to help people, our clients, and each other, do their best work.
Where this leaves you
If you're an MSP owner reading this and recognising a bit of your own hero complex, I'd say the same thing to you that I eventually had to say to myself: stepping back isn't giving up. It's the actual job.
Create the environment. Document the expectations. Give people a real path and a safe way to try it. Hold the line on accountability. Then get out of the middle of it.
The business that can run without you in the room isn't a business that's lost you. It's a business that's finally free of its biggest single point of failure.