A few years into executive search, I started noticing a pattern that had nothing to do with resumes or salary bands.

Every time a client called me to replace a “non-performing” senior leader, I’d sit through the debrief and hear almost the same story. Smart person. Good track record on paper. But somehow, the team under them had gone quiet. People stopped raising their hands. Nobody argued in meetings anymore, not because everyone agreed, but because nobody thought it was worth the trouble.

That’s usually not a skills problem. That’s a control problem.

Somewhere along the way, we started confusing leadership with control. We measure a leader by how tightly they hold the reins, how many decisions pass through them, how much the team “needs” them. But the leaders who actually build something lasting are almost the opposite. Their teams don’t need them in the room to move forward. Their people don’t wait for permission to think.

I’ve tried to build TPC on that idea, even when it was hard.

In the early days, it’s tempting to hold onto everything yourself. You’ve built the client relationships, you know the search process inside out, and honestly, it’s faster to just do it yourself than explain it to someone else. But that instinct, if you don’t catch it, quietly turns you into a bottleneck. Your team stops making calls. They start asking “what would you do” instead of trusting their own judgment. And you end up with a business that can’t run a single day without you in it.

I see the same thing on the other side of the table too, with the women coming through Recruit Her. Most of them have spent years being told, gently or otherwise, what to do and how to do it. So when they start out as recruiters, their first instinct is to look for the “right answer” from me or from their trainer, before they trust their own read on a candidate. My job in those early weeks isn’t to give them more instructions. It’s to step back enough that they discover they were capable of judgment all along. The moment I see a woman push back on my feedback with her own reasoning, that’s when I know the training is actually working.

That’s what inspiring leadership looks like in practice. It’s not about being softer or less demanding. It’s about being clear on the outcome you want and then genuinely letting go of how people get there.

I think about my mentor, Akanksha, in this context too. In every conversation, she asks more questions than she gives answers. It would be so much faster for her to just tell me what to do. But she doesn’t, and that’s exactly why those conversations stay with me longer than advice ever would. She’s not trying to be needed. She’s trying to make sure I don’t need her.

Control feels safer in the short run. You can see it, measure it, report on it. Inspiration is slower and messier to build, and you can’t always point to the exact moment it worked. But control has a ceiling. A team that’s controlled will only ever perform as well as the person controlling it, on their best day. A team that’s inspired can surprise you, sometimes even outgrow you, and that’s the whole point.

If you’re leading a team right now and wondering why growth has stalled, it might be worth asking a harder question than “are they performing.” Ask instead, “would this team still function well if I disappeared for a month.” If the honest answer makes you uncomfortable, that discomfort is telling you something real.

The best compliment I’ve ever gotten about TPC wasn’t about a placement or a client win. It was when someone on my team made a tough call on their own, got it right, and only told me about it after. That’s leadership doing its actual job. Not being in every room. Just making sure the room doesn’t need you to function well.