November 2025

Why Your “Competing Commitments” Are Stalling Your Team

There is a pattern I observe in founders led companies that is quietly stifling their organizations. It is not a lack of skill, and it is not a lack of vision. It is a conflict of identity.

The pattern looks like this: A founder walks into a meeting and casually says, “We should get some case studies from clients.”

To the founder, this is just an idea – a helpful contribution. Whoever hears that idea – no matter how many levels below the founder they sit – treats it as a directive, not an idea.

That directive collides with existing priorities. It creates confusion. It overloads people with tasks that aren’t anchored in a clear problem or purpose. The only real “why” behind it is (when it comes to execution): the founder said so. (even if the founder didn’t mean it like that)

On the surface, this looks like a communication issue. But if we look deeper, we find what organizational psychologists call “Competing Commitments.” You say you are committed to building an autonomous, empowered team. But subconsciously, you are committed to being the person who saves the day.

The outcome – chaos, missed deadlines, lack of clarity, misunderstandings, last-minute firefighting, and the whole company being dependent on the founder to save the day.

So What’s Really Happening?

A founder comes across a single piece of information. Perhaps someone tells them something at a conference. It might be something vague like, “People are talking about your company.”

Instead of slowing down and asking, “Which people? How often? What exactly did they say?”—they treat the information as truth.

From there, everything accelerates. They jump to a conclusion: “This is a problem.” They decide the problem requires action: “This is something we need to deal with.” They decide on a solution: “We need some case studies.”

They decide who should do it – and task them directly. All of this happens before anyone else is involved. Before more data is gathered. Before the actual owner of the problem has any say in defining it. One data point becomes a full-blown directive with organizational weight behind it.

The “Artisan” Identity vs. The Enterprise Builder

Chris, owner of Crown Capital, who specializes in transitioning founder-led businesses, describes this perfectly when I recently spoke with him. He notes that many founders get stuck at a specific revenue ceiling because they are running an “Artisan Shop.”

In an Artisan Shop, the founder is the product. They are the best salesperson, the best product designer, and the best problem solver. The business relies entirely on their personal craftsmanship. As Chris points out, “It feels really good to be needed.”

This is the seduction of the Artisan identity. In the early days, your identity was tied to being the engine that made things move. You were the “fixer.” But as the company scales, that same identity becomes a “cul-de-sac”—a dead end where you are running in circles, unable to scale because you cannot scale yourself.

To break through, you have to fundamentally alter your relationship with the company. You must stop viewing the company as an extension of your personal output and start viewing it as a system that you design.

This Isn’t Malicious – The Founders Are Not Doing Anything Wrong

In fact, it’s rooted in something pretty brilliant. To understand why this happens and what can be done about it, you have to begin by looking at how founders see themselves, their role, and their identity. If we treat their actions as a “bad habit to correct,” we miss the point entirely.

Behavior doesn’t change because someone is told to “slow down” or “stop giving solutions.” It changes when they see what’s driving the behavior in the first place. Founders often have commitments running in the background that they don’t fully see:

• A commitment to being useful.
• A commitment to being helpful.
• A commitment to ensuring their people succeed.
• A commitment to adding value.
• A commitment to being essential.

These commitments got them where they are. However, these are the same commitments that are keeping them stuck now.

Even if a founder says they want empowerment, autonomy, and a team that owns problems end-to-end – their deeper commitment, the one they don’t consciously see, can still run the show. Our competing commitments make all of us run on autopilot.

Why This Is So Hard

Keith Rabois, who helped build PayPal, LinkedIn, and Square, has a useful framework here. He learned it from Peter Thiel. The idea is simple: before you get involved in a decision, consider two things. First, how strong is your conviction about the right answer? Second, how significant are the consequences if you’re wrong?

If the consequences are low and your conviction is low, let your team run with it. If the consequences are high and your conviction is high, get involved. But most founders don’t think this way. They treat every decision like it’s high stakes. They jump in everywhere. And over time, their team learns to wait for permission instead of taking ownership.

The Shift in Being: From Hero to Architect

Changing behavior (e.g., “I will speak less in meetings”) is rarely enough because behaviors are only symptoms that happen downstream of identity (who you are). If you still identify as the “Hero or the Problem Solver” you will inevitably intervene when things get tough.

You have to shift your state of Being.

Chris shares his own painful transition from being a high-net-worth attorney/consultant to a fund manager. As a consultant, he was the product. To move to the next level, he had to enter “The Dip”—a period of discomfort where he had to stop doing the work that made him feel valuable (billable hours, direct client advice) to invent a new identity as an asset allocator.

He had to stop asking, “How do I solve this?” and start asking, “How do I build a system that solves this?”

This is a crisis of ego. It requires accepting that your value is no longer defined by your direct output.

The Cost Nobody Talks About

Here’s what happens when this pattern runs unchecked.

The team stops thinking. They learn that their job isn’t to solve problems—it’s to wait for the founder to tell them what to do.

The best people leave. Not because they don’t believe in the mission, but because they’re tired of being treated like executors instead of leaders.

The founder becomes the bottleneck. Everything runs through them because that’s what the organization has learned to expect.

The founder burns out. They can’t understand why nobody else steps up—when in reality, they’ve trained the whole company not to.

And none of this is visible to the founder. Because from their perspective, they’re just being engaged. Responsive. Helpful.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Next time you hear a piece of information or feel the urge to act, pause. Ask yourself: Am I about to make this my problem to solve?

If the answer is yes, stop. Then ask:

Whose problem is this, really? Not who should solve it — who actually owns this domain?

Separate what happened from what you’re making it mean from what you’ve already decided to do.

What would it look like if I held space instead of solving this?

That might mean bringing the issue to the right person and asking, “What do you make of this?” It means staying engaged without taking over.

This will feel uncomfortable. It’ll feel like you’re not adding value. Like you’re being passive.

You’re not.

You’re teaching your team that they’re capable. You’re building their ownership. You’re creating space for them to rise.

This shift requires new practices that force you to step out of the “Artisan” role.

1. The Bezos Decision Framework

Most founders treat every decision as a crisis that requires their “Hero” identity. Jeff Bezos counters this by distinguishing between Type 1 (irreversible) and Type 2 (reversible) decisions.

The “Artisan” founder treats everything as Type 1. The “Architect” founder realizes that 90% of decisions are Type 2. By recognizing that most doors are two-way, you can suppress the urge to intervene, allowing the team to own the risk and the learning.

2. The Munger Inversion

Chris utilizes a technique from Charlie Munger called “Inversion.” Instead of asking, “How do I help my team succeed?” ask, “What would I do if I wanted to ensure my team remains helpless?”

• Answer: I would solve every hard problem for them. I would correct their work before they finish it. I would make every decision myself.
• Realization: By doing these things, you are actively sabotaging the autonomy you claim to want.

3. Creating “Thinking Space”

You cannot shift your identity if you are constantly reacting. Chris implemented a rigorous practice of blocking out Thursday afternoons entirely. No meetings, no calls—just “block production time” to think. (My interview with Chris will come out early next year – 2026)

If you are always on the treadmill of execution, you are acting as an employee of your own company, not its leader. You need space to detach from the “doing” so you can work on the “being.”

A New Relationship With Your Business

There’s something else worth naming here. As a company grows, the founder’s relationship with it has to change. What worked at twenty people breaks at two hundred. The intimacy that once held everything together can become the very thing that holds it back.

This isn’t failure. It’s evolution.

The founder who built the startup has to become the leader who builds the institution. And that requires letting go of being needed in the old ways while finding new ways to matter. This is one of the loneliest transitions in leadership. And it’s rarely talked about.

The Audit:
To make this shift real, you need a feedback loop.

• Find a Truth-Teller: Give a trusted partner permission to interrupt you. “If you see me playing the Hero, call it out.”
• The Weekly Reflection: Ask yourself, “What did I take ownership of this week that wasn’t mine?”

You have to let go the loss of your old identity – the one that saved the day, the one that knew all the answers. That version of you was essential to get the company from $0 to $2 million. But that version of you is now the primary obstacle getting from $2 million to $20 million.

Your team doesn’t need a savior. They need a leader who believes they can save themselves.

There’s a pattern I see in certain companies that’s puzzling at first glance.

The CEO is a very nice and kind person. Genuinely kind. The kind of person people respect deeply and stay loyal to for decades. They’ve built a team of exceptional people around them. Each one of them can be called superstars by any measure.

And yet.

Those superstars play against each other. They form factions. They undermine one another in meetings. They gossip. They politic. They spread negativity behind closed doors. I have now seen it in too many companies to call it a “pattern”.

As a result, the culture suffers. Performance of the company suffers. And if the company suffers, each individual superstar is also suffering. But – alas – they can not see that. They continue pointing fingers at others and getting defensive when a finger is pointed at them. They are all losing – because the company is losing – and yet they think that they are each performing well.

From the outside, it doesn’t make sense. Great leader. Great people. Terrible dynamics.

But when you look closer, it makes perfect sense.

The Question Nobody Wants to Ask

When a team is dysfunctional, the natural instinct is to look at the team.

“These people are too competitive.”

“They have ego problems.”

“They’re not team players.”

But that’s rarely the whole story.

The harder question is: What is the founder or the CEO doing – or not doing – that makes this behavior possible?

Because here’s the thing. Smart people don’t engage in politics for fun. They do it because something in the system rewards it. Or at least doesn’t punish it.

So if you’ve got a team of brilliant people acting like rivals instead of partners, something in the environment is allowing it. And that environment starts at the top.

What’s Really Going On

To understand this, you have to look at how the CEO sees themselves, their role, and their relationship with conflict.

If we treat the team’s behavior as the problem to fix, we miss the point entirely.

The CEO likely has commitments running in the background – commitments they don’t fully see. These commitments feel like virtues. They probably are virtues. But left unexamined, they create the exact conditions for dysfunction. These commitments create a “pattern” of behavior for the founder/CEO that then leads to the pattern we see with the team.

These commitments are what the Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan calls the Competing Commitments (from his & Lisa Lahey’s work on the book “Immunity to Change”) . They are the hidden commitments you made to yourself long ago that now quietly competing with your biggest goals.

Here are some of the competing commitments I find in these companies and their leaders:

(one or many of the below might be applicable for you)

A Commitment to Being Liked

Kind leaders want people to feel good around them. They want to be seen as fair, caring, approachable.

The other side of it? They avoid hard conversations.

When two superstars are at war, the kind CEO might hope it resolves itself. They might talk to each person privately but never bring them into the same room. They smooth things over instead of naming the real issue. They avoid taking sides because someone might get hurt.

The result? Nothing gets resolved. The conflict goes underground. It becomes hallway conversations and political maneuvering instead of direct confrontation.

The CEO thinks they’re keeping the peace. They’re actually teaching the team: We don’t deal with conflict here. You’re on your own.

A Commitment to Being Fair

Kind leaders bend over backwards to be equitable. They don’t want anyone to feel favored or overlooked.

The other side? They refuse to make clear calls.

They won’t publicly say, “This is the direction we’re going.” They won’t back one leader’s approach over another, even when the situation demands it. They keep things open-ended in the name of fairness.

So what do the superstars learn? The CEO won’t decide. Which means I have to win through other means.

That’s when politics becomes rational. If the boss won’t pick a direction, the team will fight it out amongst themselves – through influence, alliances, and undermining each other.

A Commitment to Harmony

Some leaders believe that good teams shouldn’t have conflict. That if people are fighting, something is wrong.

The other side of it? They suppress tension instead of working through it.

They shut down debates too early. They change the subject when things get heated. They privately ask people to “be more collaborative” instead of letting the team wrestle with real disagreements.

The result? The real conversations happen outside the room. People learn that the only way to be heard is through back channels.

That’s not politics because people are bad. It’s politics because the front door is closed.

A Commitment to Loyalty

When a CEO has people who’ve stayed for decades, there’s deep mutual respect there. But it can also become a trap.

The other side of it? They tolerate behavior they shouldn’t because of history.

A superstar who’s been there for fifteen years gets a pass for things that would get someone else fired. The CEO tells themselves, “That’s just how they are.” Or, “They’ve earned the right.”

The rest of the team sees this. And they learn that rules don’t apply equally. That tenure is protection. That power is about relationships, not performance. That’s fertile ground for factions and resentment.

The Painful Truth

Here’s what makes this so difficult.

Every one of these commitments feels like a virtue. Being kind. Being fair. Wanting harmony. Valuing loyalty. Staying above pettiness.

These are good things. They’re probably why people respect this CEO. They’re probably why people have stayed so long.

But taken too far—or left unexamined—they create the conditions for exactly what the CEO hates.

The CEO’s kindness, without clarity and courage, becomes a fertile ground for dysfunction.

Nobody’s being malicious. But the system is producing politics because the leader – without realizing it – has made politics the only viable path.

What Might Be Missing

If I had to name what’s absent, it would be these:

Naming reality.

Sitting the team down and saying, “Here’s what I see happening. The politics. The groupisms. The gossip. It’s not acceptable. And I’m willing to look at how I’ve contributed to it.” Most leaders skip this. They address symptoms. They talk to individuals. They hope things or people will change. It won’t. Someone has to name the thing out loud.

Making hard calls.

Superstars need clarity. They need to know who owns what. Whose strategy wins. Where the boundaries are.

When everything is open for negotiation, people negotiate through power instead of merit. The CEO has to be willing to decide—even when it disappoints someone.

Holding people accountable visibly.

Not in a shaming way. But in a way that signals to the whole team: this behavior has consequences. We don’t do politics here. We don’t tolerate undermining. The founder/CEO has to be willing to say: “This is no longer ok.” or “This can never happen again.”

If accountability only happens in private, the team never sees it. And what the team doesn’t see, the team doesn’t believe.

Having the conversations nobody wants to have.

Bringing two warring leaders into a room and saying, “We’re not leaving until this is resolved.” Letting the discomfort happen instead of smoothing it over. Most kind people avoid this. It feels aggressive. It feels risky. But it’s the only way through.

Powerful leaders raise the tension and let their people grow through the tension. They do not avoid the tension – or defuse it too early.

Letting go of someone they care about.

Sometimes, one person is the source. And the CEO knows it. But they can’t bring themselves to act because of history, loyalty, or genuine affection.

So the whole system stays sick to protect one relationship.

This might be the hardest one of all. And often, it’s the one that would change everything.

The Shift

This isn’t about becoming less kind. The world needs kind leaders.

But kindness without clarity creates confusion. Kindness without courage enables dysfunction. Kindness without accountability becomes complicity.

The shift is learning to be both.

Kind and clear. Kind and direct. Kind and willing to make the hard call.

That’s not a contradiction. That’s integration.

And that’s the leader this team of superstars is waiting for.

They don’t need someone who keeps the peace. They need someone who builds the peace – by being willing to disrupt the false comfort of gossip, politics, and rumors.

That’s when everything changes. What are your competing commitments?