Who Are You Waiting to Give You Permission?

There is a point in almost every business journey where capability stops being the main issue. The business owner knows enough, the leader has enough experience, the organisation has enough evidence, and the next move is reasonably clear. And yet nothing happens. 

Another review gets commissioned, another plan gets written, another adviser gets consulted, another version gets refined, and another month passes. From the outside this can look like caution, and sometimes it is. But sometimes it is something far more human: we are waiting for permission. Not literal permission, nobody is standing at the door refusing us entry, but the quieter kind. 

Permission to back our own judgement. Permission to say we are ready. Permission to stop preparing and start acting.

It’s like we create our own red tape and then believe it. 

I have been thinking about this because it shows up constantly in the work I do with business owners, leaders and organisations. 

Quite often I am brought into a conversation about strategy, marketing, positioning or growth, and before long the commercial question reveals a human one. Why has this decision not been made yet? Why is the owner still doing work the team could do? Why has a genuinely valuable capability never been commercialised? Why does an experienced leader still hesitate to articulate what they know? These are not always strategy problems. Often they are questions about the metric being used to decide whether we are ready. Honestly – are we all ever really 100% ready??

The Metric System We Never Agreed To

Years ago, while writing my book *Unpacking*, I became preoccupied with the idea of inadequacy. To feel inadequate means we are measuring ourselves against something, a benchmark, a standard, an invisible line we believe we have failed to cross. I started asking what exactly I was measuring, who had designed the scale, and why I trusted it. Why did I keep going back to this ridiculous measurement tool I had made up myself?

That question has followed me into business, because business gives us no shortage of metrics: revenue, profit, headcount, market share, qualifications, awards, titles, years of experience, followers, growth percentages. Some of these are useful, even essential. But some quietly become proxies for worth, and that is where things get dangerous.

A business owner can have twenty years of evidence that they understand their market and still believe someone with a larger company must know more. A leader can have guided teams through difficult situations repeatedly and still hesitate because they lack the title they associate with leadership. A technical founder can build something genuinely valuable and then spend years waiting for someone more authoritative to confirm that it matters. The real question is whether we are measuring capability, or measuring ourselves against symbols that simply make us feel legitimate. Those are not the same thing.

Here’s the thing- We Are Trained to Be Selected – from small children…

Much of early life teaches us to wait for someone else to determine whether we are ready. Someone grades the work, chooses the team, awards the qualification, approves the next step. There are good reasons for those systems, but there is also an unintended consequence: we become accustomed to being ‘selected’. Then we enter ownership or senior leadership, and the structure changes. There may be no one left above us to tell us we are ready. In the wise words of Pink Floyd – Time- “And then one day you find, ten years have got behind you. No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.” – I say fire your own gun.

Nobody arrives in the boardroom to certify that we have officially accumulated enough experience to restructure the company, enter a new market, launch the product, or stop being the person holding everything together.

At some point, selection becomes self-selection. That is an uncomfortable transition for many capable people, particularly because responsibility tends to increase at exactly the moment certainty disappears.

Confidence Is a Poor Measure of Capability

One of the most useful distinctions I have arrived at is between confidence and capability. Confidence is how we feel about our ability. Capability is what the evidence actually demonstrates. The two can be wildly different. We have all met confident people whose capability does not support their certainty, but the opposite deserves far more attention: there are extraordinarily capable people who remain unsure of themselves. They have the experience, the judgement, the track record of solving difficult problems, yet ask them if they feel ready for the next step and they hesitate.

That matters in business because if confidence becomes the prerequisite for action, capable people can wait indefinitely. Perhaps the better question isn’t *do I feel confident enough to do this*, but *what evidence do I have that I am capable of handling what happens next*. That is a far more useful leadership question. It replaces emotion with evidence, without pretending emotion doesn’t exist. What if this level of capability was taught in school. 

When Preparation Becomes Protection

None of this is an argument for recklessness. Good businesses test assumptions, good leaders sometimes seek advice, and expertise, risk and governance all genuinely matter. But there is a point where preparation quietly becomes protection. Another report protects us from deciding. Another workshop protects us from committing. Another qualification protects us from declaring expertise. Another revision protects us from publishing. The difficult question worth sitting with is this: what information do I genuinely need before acting, and what am I collecting simply because action would expose me to judgement? That distinction can be commercially significant — while one business is busy refining its confidence, another may already be learning through action.

The Business Inherits the Human

This is where my thinking around *Unpacking for Business* begins. When I originally wrote *Unpacking*, I was interested in the things we carry through life, you know, things like experiences, expectations, old fears, beliefs and measures of worth that made sense at one point but may no longer serve us. The same thing happens in business. We do not arrive at work without our history. The founder brings it with them, the CEO brings it into the boardroom, the manager brings it into the team, and eventually the organisation can start reflecting the human patterns of the people who lead it.

A leader who equates value with being needed may struggle to delegate. A founder who learned that hard work is proof of worth can build a business dependent on overwork. An owner uncomfortable with rejection may avoid selling. A leader who needs approval may tolerate poor performance for too long. Someone who fears appearing unsuccessful may keep an unprofitable product or relationship long after the commercial evidence says it should go. Then we call it culture, or process, or structure. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is simply a human pattern that became institutionalised. Which raises a fairly confronting question for anyone who leads a business: which parts of your organisation exist because it genuinely needs them, and which exist because they make you feel safer?

Note:- Being Needed Is Not the Same as Creating Value

This is a pattern I see often. Many business owners are so capable that they become central to almost everything, they solve the difficult customer issue, price the unusual job, know the history, make the judgement call, remember the detail nobody else remembers. That can feel like proof of value: everyone needs me, therefore I must be valuable. But there is another interpretation: everyone needs me, therefore I may have built dependence. Those are very different things.

A strong business should benefit from the owner’s capability without requiring the owner’s involvement in every decision, and the same applies to senior leaders. If the organisation cannot function properly without you, is that evidence of how good you are, or evidence that capability has never actually been transferred? 

It’s a difficult question, because being needed feels good right?  It can become part of our identity. If I am no longer the person everybody depends on, where does my value come from? At that point we are no longer talking about systems. We are talking about the human underneath them.

We seem to Normalise Our Strengths and Catalogue Our Weaknesses

Another pattern has become obvious to me through this work. Ask someone what their business is bad at, and the answer often comes quickly. Ask what they are particularly good at, and the conversation becomes strangely awkward. *That’s just what we do. We’ve always done that. Anyone in our industry would know that.* Maybe. But familiarity doesn’t make capability worthless, it often just makes it invisible. 

The person who has solved the same type of problem fifty times no longer experiences it as difficult, while the customer who has never solved it experiences it very differently. This is one reason technically capable businesses so often struggle to explain their value: they have normalised the very capability their customer is prepared to pay for.

People do the same thing to themselves. We remember the mistake and discount the judgement that prevented the next ten. We remember the rejection and overlook the twenty people who subsequently said yes. If a company kept its accounts this way, recording every liability in detail while repeatedly forgetting to place the assets on the balance sheet, we would consider it absurd. Yet humans do it constantly.

Here’s an idea- Perhaps Leaders Need an Evidence Register

What would happen if we measured capability differently, not through affirmation or manufactured confidence, but through evidence? What have you solved? What decisions have you made that proved correct? Which mistakes changed how you operate? What do people consistently seek your judgement on? What can your organisation do today that it couldn’t do five years ago? Where are you treating valuable capability as ordinary simply because it has become familiar? And perhaps the most important question of all: what could you already do if you stopped waiting to feel more qualified to do it? That question applies equally to people and to businesses.

So the big question- What Did Failure Actually Teach You?

One of the ideas in *Unpacking* was that we should examine what we carry forward from experience. Humans are designed to learn,  something hurts, so we become cautious; something fails, so we adjust. That’s useful until the lesson becomes too broad. A failed product becomes *I am not good at innovation*. A difficult employee becomes *people cannot be trusted*. A poor investment becomes *we should avoid risk*. A client rejection becomes *the market does not want this*. There is a real difference between learning from an event and allowing that event to define the limits of future behaviour. Perhaps one of the most useful things leaders can do is revisit the rules they formed from previous experience: what happened, what did it genuinely teach me, what am I still assuming because of it, and is that assumption still valid? Keep the lesson. Question the rule.

Push The Go Button

I wrote about the idea of pressing go in *Unpacking* long before I started seeing it quite this clearly in business. Ideas create a moment of possibility, a better way, a new product, a change, a conversation that needs to happen. 

Then comes the gap between seeing it and doing something about it, and that gap is where a remarkable amount of human potential quietly disappears. We tell ourselves we need certainty, but business rarely offers certainty. What it offers is evidence, judgement, risk and the opportunity to test. Pressing go does not mean believing everything will work. It means believing you can respond intelligently to what happens next, which is a very different thing.

So What Changes Now?

Perhaps we should have learned long ago that readiness is not a feeling, that failure is information rather than identity, and that a qualification and a capability are related but not interchangeable. That being selected is not the only evidence we belong. That expertise often feels ordinary to the person who possesses it. That saying “I don’t know” and saying “I am not capable” are completely different statements. That you can be uncertain and still act responsibly and that at some point in adult life, there will be no one left whose permission actually matters.

For a business owner or leader, the first step is to become far more interested in the measurement system behind your decisions. 

When you hesitate, ask what you believe you are missing, and name it. If it’s a genuine capability gap, close it. If it’s information, find it. If it’s risk, assess it. But if you cannot actually identify what is missing, perhaps the barrier isn’t capability at all. Perhaps it’s permission. 

Then comes the harder question: what is the business currently waiting for, because you are waiting? A restructure, a new market, a price increase, a delegation decision, a leadership transition, a decision to finally stop doing something that no longer works? The cost of waiting rarely shows up on a profit and loss statement. But it is still a cost.

So- The Question I Am Left With

The older I get, the less interested I am in manufactured confidence, and the more interested I am in accurate self-assessment. Know what you know. Know what you do not know. Understand your evidence. Learn from the misses. Build the missing capability deliberately. Ask for help when you need it. But do not confuse uncertainty with incapability, and do not spend your working life waiting for an invisible committee to decide you have finally earned the right to use everything you have already learned. No one else is interested in making your dreams come true, they are all too busy working on their own. 

For those of us running businesses, leading teams and shaping organisations, there is perhaps an even more important responsibility sitting underneath all of this: making sure we are not recreating the same permission systems for the people around us. Are we developing judgement in our teams, or simply training people to seek approval? Are we recognising capability before someone has the perfect title? Are we rewarding intelligent challenge, or building organisations full of very competent people who have quietly learned to wait?

Because that may be the real leadership question underneath all of this. Who are you still waiting to give you permission? And perhaps more importantly, who in your organisation is still waiting for yours?