Somewhere along the way, you started measuring your importance by the wrong things.
It feels like power. It feels like you're at the centre of everything, indispensable, in control.
It's the opposite. And it's making you a weaker leader.
I had this brought into focus by Arun Kumar, who I spoke with this week. Arun has lived more careers than most people can imagine, the Obama administration, where he represented the US across 78 countries; CEO of KPMG India, which he grew two and a half times; now a venture capitalist investing across two continents. But the lesson that runs through all of it came from his very first job.
He was 20. His boss was a 35-year-old named Ratan Tata, long before the world knew that name.
In meeting after meeting, the young executives talked over each other, competing to be heard.
Tata did the opposite. He did the least talking and the most listening. And when he finally spoke, the room went still because he'd absorbed everything, and in a few sentences he gave the one thing nobody else could. Direction.
He didn't need to dominate the room to control it. His power had nothing to do with how much airtime he took or how many people sat below him.
Years later, Arun saw the cost of the opposite instinct.
When he went back to lead in India, he found organisations where people measured their worth by headcount. How many staff reported to them. The bigger the team, the more important you were assumed to be.
Arun spent years dismantling that teaching people to measure themselves by the difference they made, not the number of bodies they controlled.
Here's why this matters for you, tomorrow morning:
If everything runs through you, you don't have power. You have a bottleneck.
Your team stops bringing you their best thinking because they're waiting for your answer. Decisions slow to your pace. Growth caps at your personal capacity. And the busier you get, the more you mistake the exhaustion for importance.
The leaders who can't let go of being the centre of everything are the ones who burn out, stall their companies, and lie awake wondering why nothing moves without them in the room. They confused activity with authority. By the time they see it, they've trained an entire organisation to need them for everything.
Real authority is quieter. It's the leader who listens until they understand, speaks once with clarity, and builds a company that runs on direction rather than dependence.
So here's the hard question for tomorrow.
Look at your calendar and your decisions this week and ask honestly: how much of this is here because it genuinely needs me and how much is here because I've made myself the centre of everything?
The answer might be uncomfortable. It's also the first step to leading like Tata instead of drowning in your own importance.
🎧 Full conversation with Arun on The World Class Leaders Show: link below.
One idea a week on how top CEOs lead when the stakes are high, from inside rooms most people never enter. Free, and you can leave any time.