Want to Grow Your Business? It’s an Inside Job.
Written by: Kurt Schliemann4 min read
Updated: 07/10/26
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Recently I’ve had what feels like the same conversation with 10 different people. People who are business and services consultants, whose clients are small-to-midsized businesses. In each one of these conversations, the person describes their client’s business. It’s a mess. They’ve been hired to fix it, to come up with the perfect strategy or marketing plan. And in every single one of these stories, there is a common denominator: the business is a mess because the CEO doesn’t know how to lead.
And so, in the telling of these friends, they ultimately can’t help these organizations. Not because they aren’t good at what they do, or don’t have good strategic plans. But because their strategies are limited by the people who must implement them.
Here’s what most people can’t, or won’t, see: businesses don’t fail because their strategy sucked. And they don’t succeed because they had the perfect strategy. There is no such thing as a perfect strategy. I’ve watched business owners change their strategy every year — sometimes more than one a year. And the businesses that make it aren’t because their strategy was “perfect”. It’s actually the opposite: they’re the ones who could see when their strategy wasn’t working -- and could pivot without their egos getting in the way.
Nimbleness isn’t a skill. It’s a byproduct of something way more critical to success: leadership capacity.
A business can only go as far as its leadership has gone. As far as its leader’s capacity for vulnerability, strength, and authenticity has grown. And not any further.
This doesn’t at all mean strategy doesn’t matter — strategy and execution are critically important. But as Eisenhower said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” When a plan goes wrong -- and no plans ever go perfectly -- the leaders who can navigate the tumult and bring the team with them are the ones that will succeed.
Culture is the controlling factor. A mediocre strategy can succeed inside a strong culture, because a strong culture lets people say the plan isn’t working without anyone’s ego taking the hit. They can pivot and evolve quickly and easily. They use diverse opinions and viewpoints as stress-testing for their plans.
A brilliant strategy can die inside a weak culture, because nobody’s willing to speak truth to power when things go off the rails. Culture is a mirror. It reflects the leader’s own relationship to their shortcomings. To their own character and vulnerability. It reflects largely how much work they’ve done on themselves.
When Satya Nadella took over Microsoft, he inherited a company famous for being brilliant and miserable — a “know-it-all” culture where the smartest person in the room won, and everyone else learned to stop contributing. Nadella started with a book on growth mindset, and he did something almost nobody in his position does: he let people watch him not know. He asked questions and listened to others’ answers. Curiosity - and not-knowing - became the new standard for the room.
The winning strategies of the cloud pivot and the AI bets grew out of this. But the new culture came first. And that only changed because the man at the top showed his vulnerability, he showed a willingness to be seen not having all the answers.
Or look at Alan Mulally, who took over a company about to lose seventeen billion dollars — and a leadership team that was unwilling to ever admit being wrong. Every single status report was green. Really?
This culture was embedded. It didn’t change until one executive, in a room full of people watching to see what would happen to him, finally marked his project red.
Mulally clapped.
That single reaction is the moment Ford’s culture actually turned. It wasn’t a restructuring plan, or a new product lineup. It was a new CEO showing that honesty and vulnerability would be rewarded. And a room full of leaders watching a colleague’s vulnerability laid on the line, and passing the test.
Mulally famously said later: “Who you are as a person is gonna have more to do with your success than anything else.”
Now hold those two up against WeWork, or Uber’s early years. Neither company collapsed because their vision or strategy weren’t bold enough. WeWork had a story investors couldn’t stop throwing money at. Uber had one of the most aggressive growth playbooks in startup history. What broke both of them was the same thing: a founder whose own ego became the thing that needed serving, who created a culture within which it wasn’t safe to tell him no.
In my experience, when an organization is a “mess” -- that’s the tell. It’s because the leader hasn’t done the inner work to surround him or herself with people who’ll challenge him. He hires people who make him comfortable. He builds a team of yes-men. These aren’t stupid people who can’t devise smart strategies. They are leaders whose own capacity for being questioned is stunted — and so the organization and its culture becomes stunted too.
A healthy culture welcomes challenge. It gets sharper for it. But that only happens if the person at the top has enough self-capacity to hear “you’re wrong” without also hearing “you’re worthless.”
So if you’re the leader of a business, here’s the real question that matters: not “do we have the right strategy?” Not even, “do we have a strong culture?”. The real question is “Have I expanded myself enough to carry this organization to its fullest potential?”
Because the business will only go as far as that. It will never outgrow your own personal capacity for leadership.
And so the only real strategic move left is the one nobody puts in a deck: expanding yourself, so the business can expand with you.
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