In this insightful episode, Stacey Bailey, Senior Consultant & Executive Coach of The Intention Collective, shares how creative founders can successfully lead their first team in stage 3. If you feel frustrated that no one else can keep up, think like you, or deliver the way you do, you won't want to miss it.

You will discover:

- Why expecting your team to think and work like you creates unnecessary struggle and misalignment

- How to create clarity around vision and expectations so everyone rows in the same direction

- What it takes to build real trust and give effective feedback instead of being “nice.”

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 3 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

Stacey Bailey is a leadership coach, strategist, and facilitator who helps entrepreneurs and creative leaders build businesses with heart. A certified System and Soul™ Implementor and Dare to Lead™ Certified professional, she brings more than 15 years of experience in leadership and operations within the creative services industry. Today, through Intention Collective, Stacey partners with founders and leadership teams of creative agencies generating $1M–$15M in revenue to build scalable, values-driven businesses. Her expertise includes leadership development, operational alignment, and strategic planning, and she has successfully supported organizations through private equity transitions, B Corp certification, and international expansion.

Want to learn more about Stacey Bailey's work at The Intention Collective? Check out his website at https://intentioncollective.co/

Email her at stacey@intentioncollective.co

Check out Stacey's personal website at https://www.stacey-bailey.com/

Connect with Stacey through her LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/staceylbailey/

Mentioned in this episode:

Take the Founder's Evolution Quiz Today

If you’re a Founder, business owner, or CEO who feels overworked by the business you lead and underwhelmed by the results, you’re doing it wrong. Succeeding as a founder all comes down to doing the right one or two things right now. Take the quiz today at foundersquiz.com, and in just ten questions, you can figure out what stage you are in, so you can focus on what is going to work and say goodbye to everything else.

Founder's Quiz

Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again

to the start, scale and succeed. Podcast, the only podcast that

grows with you through all seven stages of your journey as a

founder, I'm your host, Scott Ritzheimer, and today's episode

centers on all those high achieving founders out there,

creatives, dreamers, visionaries and the like, who are really

good at what they do. You know who I'm talking about? You know,

if this is you like you just crush it. And as the team around

you starts to grow, as you start bringing more people into the

fold, the problem starts to pop up that it just seems like no

one else can keep up. They don't think like you, they don't act

like you, they don't make decisions like you. They don't

work the hours that you do. And all of this starts to grow, and

as the organization gets bigger, so does the frustration of

trying to keep everyone moving in the same direction. Now

here's the bad news, that the very thing that made you

successful is also the very thing that's likely to sabotage

you at this level, as a leader, you can't out craft your way

through a people problem, and most creative founders learn

that the hard way. But the good news is that Stacey Bailey is

here with us today. Stacy is a leadership coach, strategist and

facilitator who helps entrepreneurs and creative

leaders to build businesses with heart. She's a system and soul

implementer and a dare to lead certified professional who

brings more than 15 years of experience in leadership and

operations within the creative services industry today, through

the intention collective Stacy partners with founders and

leadership teams of creative agencies generating one to 15

million in revenue to build scalable values driven

businesses. Her expertise includes leadership development,

operational alignment and strategic planning, and she has

successfully supported organizations through private

equity transitions, B Corp certification and international

expansion. Stacy, welcome to the show. Glad to have you here.

Would love to just dive in right out of the gate creative agent.

You work a lot in the creative agency space, and I have found

that this level is particularly hard for folks like that.

They've they've hired their first handful of people, and

there it's something not right. What's going on here?

Well, thanks for having me, Scott. You know,

usually these folks got into their roles because they were

great at their craft. And then, you know, we get more people in,

and they are like, Why can't these people do this the way

that I do this? And usually they've elevated themselves into

a little bit of a pickle, right? So what we tend to find is that

we've got founders who are makers, and they go, I can't

take it all. I've been doing all of it for too long, and I'm

exhausted. But now I don't quite know how to convey clearly what

good looks like, what excellent looks like, how I want these

people to elevate in their craft, so that I can let go of

the reins a little bit.

Yeah, I think one of the things that makes

this hard is that for high performers who have the style,

makeup, guts to go out and start their own thing with all the

risk that comes with that, they tend to also be the type of

folks who don't really like to be managed a whole lot and and

so one of the things that I think they do is impose that

view on others as well. Do you see that happening in the

creative space?

Absolutely, these people started businesses

because they didn't want to work for someone else, right? And

they then they are saying, well, you need to go and be as

entrepreneurial as I am, but those people aren't accepting

the risk or the reward of being that entrepreneurial, because

they work for you, right? So what we find is that the biggest

trick is getting these leaders to be really clear about

expectations and about what they actually want, because they just

go and do and they don't know how to communicate.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think it's a

particularly big challenge in spaces like creative agencies,

because the the barriers to entry are so low that anyone who

is kind of even close to thinking about one day starting

their own like they'll just go and do it, or at least give it a

shot. And so what that means is you have a lot of people who who

have the opportunity to do it and choose to work for someone

else instead. That's very, very telling. And, and so you have,

you know, this group who can do it on their own, want to do it

on their own, love doing it on their own, who've brought in a

bunch of people who don't want to do it on their own. And, and

it feels like we're talking at each other, even past each

other. How have you found founders in that place? How can

they start to change the way that they communicate, to bring

the best out of their people?

It all starts with actually having a vision,

right? Like a lot of these founders come in and they are

creating lifestyle businesses, which is great, right? Like

they're great at their craft. They've got enough clients to

support their the amount of money that they want to make,

and then maybe they get more. And so then they bring in team,

and then all of a sudden, they have a company that is bigger

than they ever anticipated. That happens all the time, especially

in this creative space. So getting founders and their teams

to get really clear on what is the vision about what are we

doing here? Why are we doing this? Are we trying to create a

lifestyle business? Are we trying to scale this business?

Do we want to be the best at what right? Once we can get

really clear on that, everything else tends to start to fall into

place where then you start to see all of the players on the

board and what their unique geniuses are, and how it ladders

up, but that tends to be the pivot point between everyone

being in a raft, kind of rowing in opposite directions, and

creating struggle and strife to let's all be in the same boat,

in the same direction, paddling with each other. And it's all

goes down to that vision first.

Are there right and wrong visions?

Oh, great question. I think that a vision

is only as good as everyone's commitment to it. So if you set

a vision that your team is not about, then it's not going to

work, and you're either going to need to get a new team or a new

vision. But as long as the vision is something that the

founder believes in and can buy into and can galvanize the rest

of the squad around. I think that anything like that is worth

pushing things forward, and a vision can be reset and recast.

Yeah, yeah, it's so true. So one of the

things that's interested me, we've actually met before, which

is a lot of fun. I don't get to meet a lot of my guests before

we we chat, but dare to lead, and the certification that Brene

and her team have put together is fantastic. How do you bring

that into this entrepreneurial space?

So we find that leadership teams, or newly

forming leadership teams, if they don't exist yet, they tend

to have a lot of trust issues. They wouldn't describe it that

way. They would say, we trust each other to get the work done,

or we trust each other if there was an emergency to have each

other's back, right? But the way that Brene Brown's dare to lead

breaks down the elements of trust around this braving

acronym, around boundaries and reliability and all these

things. Once we really break that down, people go, oh yeah,

we've got, we've got some trust issues, right? And that goes

back to Patrick lencionis, five dysfunctions of a team, you

know? And so a lot of it is around trust, communication,

vulnerability and leadership. And in these creative

businesses, you have a lot of people who are actually pretty

vulnerable, because creatives tend to have a lot more exposed

feelings,

yeah?

Then you know, more technical folks, and that's

great, but we have to, like, surface those, name those, work

through those. So we use, you know, dare to lead training to

help leadership teams develop the trust, the language and the

communication to really build on so that all of the strategic

planning work can actually be accomplished.

You said that they lack trust, but wouldn't

call it that. What do they call it? What are some of the

symptoms of a team that's lacking trust?

So, you know, often they will say, Well, we,

you know, we're, everybody's working hard, but we're not

getting it done. It's like, okay, well, that tends to come

back to like trust, but they are like, I trust that they're

working hard, right? So they're not labeling it that way. Or

it's that we disagree and we can't come up with how to agree,

or I don't feel comfortable saying the hard truth to the

founder, even though it's holding us all back, right? So

sometimes they actually think of it as like I'm being respectful,

because I'm and I'm being nice, but I'm not being kind. I'm not

saying what needs to be said so that we can be a team that is

fully functioning in our truth.

Yeah, it almost sounds like you're saying

that not being that being nice could actually take tear down

Trust, which is probably breaking a few people's minds at

the moment. So walk us through, how does that happen?

So Brene Brown talks a lot about being kind,

not being nice, and so the way that I like to tell that story

is nice is, Scott, you have something in your teeth, and I'm

not going to tell you because I don't want you to feel

uncomfortable. But being kind is telling you you have something

in your teeth so that you don't look like a fool as you're

walking around, right? And I my interest in being nice is

actually for my own benefit, because I don't want to sit in

that discomfort versus kindness as being okay with the other

people having whatever feelings they're going to have, but you

have to say the truth so that we can all know what's going on.

Yeah. And I think you nailed one of the key

tensions around why this is such a particular challenge in the

creative space, is that sometimes, if it's objective,

you have something in your teeth, but it's like that ad,

that art, that copy, that whatever, that's a little more

subjective and and what I've found is. Oftentimes when folks

are really good at something, they may be very good at

themselves, but not really able to articulate how to get there

or why. How do you help folks that are high performers in

their own right start to overcome that and actually turn

it into a strength?

Man, feedback is something that we do not

practice right. Feedback is something it's a skill. It's its

own sort of art form. And you know, creatives who went to art

school got a lot of practice and feedback, giving critiques and

that, and they they, some of them have deep scars from it,

yeah, but when we get into the professional workplace, we just

don't get feedback in the same way. So that's something that we

work with folks a lot is thinking about feedback as a

gift, truly about how we think about giving people, you know,

in the moment, bad news best served, hot kind of feedback so

that we're not letting things linger and fester and we can

actually grow and develop it. So one of the things I love to

coach people, to do is to actually build it into their one

on ones. If they're a manager, it's like, I'm going to give you

feedback every one on one, and I want you to come and give me

feedback as your manager every one on one, because then we're

building a muscle of feedback. But that tends to be the weakest

part. People just don't give feedback because they want to be

nice. They don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, but then no

one's elevating.

Yeah, one of the things that starts to take

shape at this level is that the There are formal team settings,

and then there are individual settings, and those start to

become increasingly separate when it comes to something like

feedback, or some of the trust conversations we talked about

earlier, how can a leader navigate which which forum to do

it in? How do you know if it's a one on one conversation or a

team conversation?

I think anything that is going to elevate the

group should be given in the group setting, especially if

it's positive feedback that you're reinforcing, positive

behavior, positive outcomes that you want to keep seeing that

should always be in the group. If it's constructive or

sensitive or based on what you know about the person you're

giving feedback to, you think that they will receive it better

in that one on one setting, then you should always do do that. We

never want anyone to feel attacked, nor do we want to

build shame. Brene Brown talks a lot about shame as she is this

shame researcher, right? So a lot of that dare to lead is

around lowering our shame shields and our armor that build

up at work. And so when we get feedback, we have to be

conscientious of that, because we don't want people to armor up

and then they don't receive it. So anything that's going to feel

sensitive should be one on one. Anything that is elevating the

group should be in the group setting.

Yeah, that's really good. That's really good.

Stacy. There's a question that I have for you, and I want to make

sure after this week, we let folks know how they can get in

touch with you for more help. But before we get there, the

question is this, ask all my guests what, what is the biggest

secret you wish wasn't a secret at all. What's that one thing

you wish everybody watching or listening today knew

as a leader, you do not need to have all the

answers. You don't even need to have half of the answers. You

need to provide clarity and kindness and help them. Them

being your team, or the people you're working with, come to

those conclusions themselves. I work with a lot of leaders who

are like, but I don't know the answers, and it makes me feel

less than like, I'm not equipped. It's like, but as

leaders, the best leaders don't know all of the answers they

have the team. Help them reveal the answers.

Yeah, yeah. It's, it's, it's interesting the

whole arc of that, because you go from doing everything

yourself, being everything yourself, having a couple of

helpers around you, to not even knowing everything yourself,

there's a lot of vulnerability in that, in and of itself. And

this isn't something that comes naturally. This I found for most

founders that, you know, most of us don't just kind of come out

of the gate, you know, ready to lead in this way. And you know,

vast majority of founders would benefit from someone walking

alongside them. Tell us, how can folks find more out about the

work that you do? Where can they connect with you?

Absolutely. You can find us online at

intentioncollective.co, or you can email me at Stacey, S, T, A,

C, E, y, at intention collective.co, we work alongside

founders and leadership teams to go from being founder led to

leadership team led, and to scale from that. You know, what

got us here isn't going to get us there in that next pivot

point, especially in the creative space. And, you know, I

don't want to hit the AI, you know, buzzword of the day. But

with AI, I feel like this work is becoming even more critical,

because leadership and clarity is going to become sort of the

essence of what gets you to move forward.

So good, so good. Stacey, it was just

fantastic having you on. Great to see you again as well. Thanks

so much for coming and sharing. In with us some fantastic

thoughts. I absolutely love this conversation, and for those of

you watching and listening, you know your time and attention

mean the world to us, I hope you got as much out of this

conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you

next time. Take care.