Staying present when things get complex

Client Story

Digital marketing agency · 2.5 years in business

When we started working together, the agency was doing good on paper. A steady roster of clients. Three full-time employees. Enough revenue to breathe. But not quite enough to relax.

The complexity wasn’t the work itself. It was the layering that life brings: client urgency, team dependency, and the founder’s own life getting heavier in quiet, cumulative ways. There wasn’t anything dramatic happening. Just enough to make every decision feel more loaded than it should have.

In sessions, there was a recurring impulse:“I just need to know the right move here.”

This leader has great judgement and was not used to feeling overthrown by decisions. But holding leadership while everything feels unfinished is exhausting. And they were feeling it. 

What stood out wasn’t that they always came prepared or had clean updates. If you’ve read my other writing here, you know that’s not what advising requires. 

What was most crucial and impressive here was that they kept showing up despite the weight of it all (and the never ending internal urge to just rush - you know the one). Some weeks they arrived clear. Other weeks they arrived foggy, behind, or frustrated with themselves. But as things got messy, they didn’t disappear and they didn’t let the stress override their integrity. 

Showing up to advising is about the sessions, yes. It’s also about what happens between the sessions.

For this particular situation, they consistently demonstrated:

• noticing where they were over-functioning for the team

• letting a few non-critical decisions sit instead of forcing resolution

• observing where urgency was coming from, rather than obeying it

They didn’t rush to fix their over-functioning - or try to just stop cold turkey (we all know what happens when we try that). They didn’t succumb to the false urgency of non-critical decisions. Instead, they named when urgency was showing up. This helped see where it was coming from (sometimes even the best team members have strong views on something when they don’t actually understand the full picture and long-term business implications).

Rather than reacting, this leader stayed with the work. Kept moving on the things that were most important (according to their goals and roadmap), and knew that they would have the support within a week. They leaned on the support they brought in for themselves, which oftentimes means slowing down. Very counter intuitive, but so so helpful. This is the key to building leadership capacity and endurance. 

Because of this commitment and continuous involvement, something subtle shifted over time. 

That burning, overwhelmingly urgent question changed. 

Instead of “I just need to know what the right move is”, it became:

“Here’s what I think the move is, what do you think?”

This is the best case in an advising session, because the leader is stepping into their own leadership. Learning to trust themselves, especially when things start piling up. The value of knowing they had a thought partner who knows them and their business is what helped them build this capacity. 

And the most satisfying part for them was getting through that time and watching their business stabilize because their leadership held it all together. 

Something I think is really good to notice is that we live in a society that leads us to believe that growth happens in explosive single moments. Which is just too binary for how things actually work. 

This leader’s growth showed up in concrete, everyday ways. Consistently. 

They stopped reflexively stepping in to rewrite client emails that their account manager had already drafted. Instead, they clarified tone and expectations once, trusted the team to carry it forward, and let small imperfections exist without interpreting them as risk.

When one team member felt overwhelmed and pushed for an additional full-time hire, the founder paused instead of reacting. Together, we uncovered that the real issue wasn’t capacity. It was unclear project scoping and inconsistent client boundaries. Tightening those systems stabilized workloads without increasing payroll pressure. And they were able to teach their employees how to think about the business from different perspectives - priming them to move into leadership roles as things grew over time. 

They also slowed down a rushed decision to renegotiate a long-term client contract. By taking time, it became clear that the client’s urgency wasn’t tied to revenue risk, but to their own internal disorganization. The founder held timelines, protected the team, and maintained the relationship without absorbing unnecessary stress. (if you haven’t worked in an agency… it’s worth pointing out that this is incredibly rare but vital to longevity and preventing burnout). 

Internally, they clarified decision lanes. Including what the team could decide independently, what required context, and what truly needed founder input. Committing to this over time reduced constant Slack interruptions and gave the founder back meaningful cognitive space each week. It also gave the team permission to take full ownership of their work and that confidence helped them grow into wonderful leaders themselves. 

Most importantly, when life pressures inevitably flared, leadership didn’t collapse. Decisions stayed present through the complexity and their business stayed steady.

Building the capacity to lead without needing certainty first is really hard. And worth it because, ultimately, this is what stabilizes the business and the experience of all the people inside of it.