I used to jump in first on every email chain, answering questions I knew my team needed the answers to. I would follow up on every project, making sure my employees knew that I knew what they were working on. I kept my schedule full of meetings with the heads of every department. All of this felt like strong leadership.

I was involved, I was attentive. I was able to answer any question at almost any moment:

Who’s going to run this project?

Should we do this ad campaign?

How should we be thinking about pricing?

When we first started to get traction, it was easy to assume that we knew what we were doing.

In reality, while we’d found something that worked, we weren’t much better off than we’d been a few years before. We’d had our first intoxicating run in with success, and it had made us feel invincible.

Eventually, the wheels started to fall off. There were too many emails in my inbox, too many meetings. There were too many questions, and I was starting to feel like I didn’t have the answers anymore.

Find problems — not solutions

Since those early days, we’ve seen that it’s when you take a step back, let questions go unanswered, or simply say “Hey, I don’t know enough about this project to really be helpful to you,” that really good stuff starts to happen.

Effective leadership actually means admitting you don’t have answers. It means opening up the floor for other people to get involved and solve problems.

Instead of having your employees dutifully carrying out the orders passed down from on high, you can have people growing and rising up to meet their new responsibilities. And while they will struggle, and experience challenges just like you did, they will be building the foundations of your future business all the while.

All of this may feel contradictory to the image of the CEO you have in your head — the wise leader who hands down directives to all.

Get that image out of your head. It doesn’t work. If you want to scale your business, you need to admit that you don’t know.