Guest Articles

Most professionals spend far more time working on the job than working on themselves, and it shows. After twenty years advising founders and senior executives, from investment banks and wealth funds to companies scaling from a single million to hundreds of millions, I have become convinced that the highest-leverage move most leaders can make this year is not to add anything. It is to stop.

Not slowing down, but stopping deliberately. When the leader stops growing, the business is guaranteed to slow, and growth for a leader rarely comes from piling more onto an already overloaded plate. It comes from subtraction: deciding what to let go of, what to delegate, what to automate, and what to eliminate outright.

Most executives can tell you in detail what they should start doing. Far fewer have ever seriously asked what they need to stop, and that is the more important question.

It is also the harder question, because stopping runs against the instincts that carried most leaders to the top. The senior people I work with tend to struggle with subtraction for one of three reasons: they are used to doing everything themselves; they are chasing a perfection that does not really exist, since perfection is subjective; or they quietly fear that the people beneath them cannot execute to their standard.

The result is the same in each case. The leader who insists on holding everything ends up overloaded, and the whole organisation slows to the pace of one stretched individual. That is how senior teams, executives and founders burn out and underperform relative to what they are truly capable of.

Healthy balance

They often do not realise this is happening, because they are watching the wrong signals. The clearest diagnostic of a leadership problem is the balance sheet. Slow, incremental, year-on-year growth is often mistaken for health, when in fact it is a symptom: the business has slowed to the pace of a leader who stopped growing. The numbers are telling you what your leadership will not.

There is an illusion at work here: the belief that what you already know is enough, or that year-on-year growth is enough. It is not. Your standard is only enough when you are consistently closing the gap between where you are and what you are truly capable of. Only by closing that gap do you begin to feel any real satisfaction in the work. Everything short of it is coasting, however good the quarter looked.

This is where the inner work becomes practical rather than abstract. The reason leaders keep adding instead of subtracting is that they are running on a mental model built for where they have been, not where they are going. Most of the work I do with clients is exactly this: identifying the model a leader is operating from, and reframing it to fit where they are heading. The block is rarely capability.

It is that we do not know what we do not know. We are all familiar with our strengths, and reasonably honest about the gaps we can see; it is the assumptions we cannot see, the frame through which a leader views the market, the competition, the customers and themselves, that quietly caps the business. Humility and a hunger for mastery are what separate the truly high performers from amateurs who succeed only occasionally. Consistently good beats occasionally great.

Can’t sell

There is a second core strength that is just as underdeveloped at the top, and it compounds the first: communication. I will put this plainly, because working across the Gulf has made it impossible to ignore. Too many senior executives in this region cannot sell. Not the product, but themselves, their standard and their vision. Communication in the boardroom is held to a lower bar than the ambition of the businesses around it, and that gap is expensive.

Everything a business wants, someone else has: the clients, the customers, the strategic partnerships. Reaching them takes clear, powerful communication. The ability to influence is the most important skill in business, yet it is still treated as a soft extra rather than a core non-negotiable. It is also a problem that hides itself. If communication inside your team is not where it needs to be, and you lack the awareness to see it, you cannot fix what you do not know is broken.

The last piece is coherence: alignment between what a leader thinks, what they say and what they do. Culture is set at the very top. If the people running the company do not talk about mindset, standards and communication, those things never become part of the organisation’s ethos. A leader who says one thing and does another cannot expect alignment beneath them. So the honest questions are these. Are you in alignment? Do you have real clarity on the mission, the culture and the vision of the business? Do you deliver on what you promise?

So before you add anything else this year, ask the harder question. What do you need to stop?There is a second core strength that is just as underdeveloped at the top, and it compounds the first: communication. I will put this plainly, because working across the Gulf has made it impossible to ignore. Too many senior executives in this region cannot sell. Not the product, but themselves, their standard and their vision. Communication in the boardroom is held to a lower bar than the ambition of the businesses around it, and that gap is expensive.

Everything a business wants, someone else has: the clients, the customers, the strategic partnerships. Reaching them takes clear, powerful communication. The ability to influence is the most important skill in business, yet it is still treated as a soft extra rather than a core non-negotiable. It is also a problem that hides itself. If communication inside your team is not where it needs to be, and you lack the awareness to see it, you cannot fix what you do not know is broken.

The last piece is coherence: alignment between what a leader thinks, what they say and what they do. Culture is set at the very top. If the people running the company do not talk about mindset, standards and communication, those things never become part of the organisation’s ethos. A leader who says one thing and does another cannot expect alignment beneath them. So the honest questions are these. Are you in alignment? Do you have real clarity on the mission, the culture and the vision of the business? Do you deliver on what you promise?

So before you add anything else this year, ask the harder question. What do you need to stop?

Aidan O'Brien
CEO and Founder 
The Aidan O'Brien Group

Read ful article on CEO Middle East here