The Decisions I Should Have Given Away

Every day, as I build Kannico, I ask myself one uncomfortable question: what am I still deciding that someone else should own by now?

I know the answer I am supposed to give. I talk about this constantly. I have been coached on it. I say it to our nonprofit clients almost every week, that an organization built entirely around one person is not strong, it is fragile. I believe that. And I still catch myself holding on.

It is not that I think I make the better call. I really don't. I trust the people I work with completely;  I have confidence in their judgment, their instincts, and their care for our clients and the work we do. So what is it?

It sounds reasonable in the moment.:

I'll just handle this one quickly myself.

The team is looking to me for the answer anyway.

I've always been the one who decides — why change what works?

Each of those feels efficient. Each of those feels like leadership. And each of those, repeated enough times, becomes the exact thing that keeps leadership from forming around me.

Because here is what I finally had to admit: if every decision in my organization has to run through me, I have not built leadership. I have built dependency and called it commitment.

That is a hard thing to say out loud.

From the day I started this company, my goal was never to be the smartest person in the room. It was to build leaders. People who take what they learn at Kannico and go do something magnificent with their own vision — their own organizations, their own teams, their own ideas of what the work should become. That was the whole point.

And a leader who cannot make a decision without me is not a leader I have developed. It is a leader I have inadvertently crippled in their own pursuit of greatness.

I don't write that lightly. It is painful to acknowledge, because it means the cost of my holding on is not just a stretched calendar or a bottleneck at my desk. The cost is someone else's growth. Every decision I hold back is a decision I take from the person who should have been trusted with it.

So the problem was never that I work too hard. The problem is that hard work, aimed the wrong way, can look like leadership while doing the opposite of it. I was building a version of the exact fragility I warn our clients about — in a sector that cannot afford one more organization that only functions when its founder is in the room.

That is not good enough. Not for me, and not for the people who chose to build alongside me.

So I am making this my focus in 2026. Not as a resolution I will abandon along the way, but as a discipline I am putting real structure around.

None of this means stepping back from the work I love. It means finally doing the part of the work that’s required at this stage: building an organization that does not need me to function, so that the people inside it can become everything they are capable of becoming.