When Everyone Is All In and No One Is Sure Who's In Charge
You are building something from the ground up. Everyone on your tiny team is needed, everyone is valued, and everyone is giving everything they have. You meet in living rooms, you text at weird hours, and most importantly you believe in each other and in what you're building together.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that, the lines get blurry.
Maybe you’re starting a new organization and there’s lots of energy, enthusiasm, and ideas but no one quite has the skill set you need and you haven’t defined roles or responsibilities at all.
Maybe you're a candidate and your campaign manager is half your age, runs your schedule, holds you accountable to your own commitments, and knows more about winning elections than you do. But your name is on the ballot. It's your vision, your reputation, your loss if it goes sideways.
Maybe you're a founder who just brought on your first employee. She's operational, skilled, and here specifically because she knows things you don't. You need to learn from her. But you built this. You are still the boss and the visionary.
Maybe you're an organizer who has been going it alone for a long time trying to get your passion project off the ground, and now there are other cooks in the kitchen and it's so exciting to have a team around you but you’re having trouble letting go of control.
In all of these cases the org chart doesn't reflect the real distribution of power and skill. And that gap, if you don't name it and navigate it deliberately, becomes a tinder box.
You feel judged, ashamed of what you don't know, and like you’re losing control of your own organization. You worry that you aren't being respected and that your vision is being watered down. And underneath all of that a fierce voice that says, “this is MY thing.”
And the people on the other side of that dynamic usually aren't trying to undermine you. They're excited and focused on the work. They're doing exactly what you brought them in to do. They're not thinking about your feelings, because that's not their job.
That mismatch is where the tinder box ignites.
When you bring something that has been nascent, fledgling, and a delicate dream of yours into a shared space it can be really tricky and disorienting. The dysfunction that follows often looks like a family that never quite sorted out who the adults are. In small, mission-driven, build-it-from-scratch teams, that's an easy pattern to fall into. Everyone is so invested, so close, so needed. The work is personal, the relationships are intense, and the team becomes a stand-in for community, for validation, for belonging. That's where it gets dangerous.
Your team cannot be your whole support system, your source of worth, or your community. And you cannot be theirs. You can love each other, be deeply invested in each other, and build something genuinely radical together. But when there are no boundaries, when the job becomes everything, it stops working. For everyone.
A grounded leader knows herself well enough to direct her team in how to support her. She is clear about who decides. She models boundaries not because she's cold or corporate but because, as Brené Brown says, clarity is kindness. She builds her messy, vulnerable, human support system outside the team so she doesn't need the team to hold all of that.
Setting the culture and getting clear about roles is your job. Even when the culture is only two people. Even when you're building it for the first time and nobody ever showed you how. That's what I'm here for. Let's talk.