When the Steering Wheel Starts to Shake

I was talking to a CEO last week, and the story she told me fit a pattern I’ve been thinking about.

She had been running her business for about 7 years. During that time, she found a niche, got focused on it, and the business grew. She’s now at the point where she understands the problems better than her clients do, and she and her team are being sought out for their expertise.

Instead of following the client’s lead, the clients are asking her to lead — and her team is hesitant to step into that role. They keep pulling her back into the client work, just as she was finding her way out.

This is what I call the Indispensable Threshold — the moment when the business is ready for its leader to operate at a higher level, but the leader hasn’t yet found a way to release the work that made them successful. The organization is waiting on a version of its leader that hasn’t fully arrived. In the meantime, it’s running on the one who does everything.

The faster we go, the more we miss

When pressure builds — from outside the firm or from our own minds — the default move is more control. The wheel gets gripped tighter. Back into the tactical work, because it feels useful, because we’re good at it, because it’s faster than explaining it to someone else.

That’s where she found herself. Scanning email while her kids were talking to her. Jumping into Slack threads to “help” the team move projects along. Holding everything in her head rather than in the systems and people around her.

I’ve watched this dynamic take a predictable toll: when the leader isn’t in the room, decisions stall. When she is, the team stops developing the instincts they’d need to lead on their own. The grip that feels like control quietly becomes the ceiling on what the organization can do.

She knew something was wrong. Successful on paper, internally exhausted, wondering if the business owned her rather than the other way around.

A shaking steering wheel is a symptom, not the problem — alignment, tires, road conditions. Gripping harder doesn’t fix it. The shake gets worse.

Becoming a person of influence

What I work on with leaders at the Indispensable Threshold is a shift in how they show up. The aim is to become the person whose presence raises the quality of everyone else’s thinking — so the organization runs on its own instincts, not just the leader’s.

In the leaders I work with, that shift looks like fewer decisions that only they can make. More moments where they ask a question instead of giving an answer. Meetings where the team leaves energized rather than just relieved. It’s slower sometimes — but more accurate, and significantly more sustainable.

If any of this sounds familiar, I’d love to hear about it.

Hit reply and tell me what that dangerous edge looks like for you today. Or if you know a leader who is white-knuckling their way through their own success, feel free to forward this to them.