Are you a frustrated leader?

You’ve built something real. You’ve proven the market. You have a team. But lately, it’s felt like you’re the only one holding it all together.

You keep saying what needs to happen, but it doesn’t. The best ideas still come from you. Deals don’t come through without you. You’re the one catching the mistakes.

If that sounds familiar, you might be a frustrated leader. The good news: it’s fixable. The harder news: it starts with you.

If you’ve hired most of your team, how could they all be “not quite there”? What’s really happening isn’t a lack of talent, it’s a pattern where you’re still the hub, and everyone else is a spoke.

Leadership is hard to scale because envisioning, guiding, delegating don’t always feel like work—getting in the weeds does. But leading is the work, especially in upmarket B2B SaaS where the game is more chess than checkers.

Here’s what I’ve learned, both firsthand and from working with leaders in this exact moment, about moving from a frustrated leader to a true visionary who builds teams that scale themselves.

Cultivate your taste

The most frustrated leaders I know are salt of the earth. They’re in it for the mission, even if the mission is running out of a cinderblock-walled office in the basement of a warehouse.

If you’re someone who says, “I’ll know it when I see it,” you might have stopped seeing it.

As the company gains traction, some leaders’ taste stagnates. Their bar for “great” stays fixed at their MVP, and it shows up everywhere: in design, in communication, even in the people they promote.

The only way I know to improve taste and build discernment is to study. Look at products you admire. Browse sites you think are exceptional. Scroll Pinterest if you have to. Ask yourself what makes something feel elevated and why.

Having taste is one thing. Living it is leadership. It’s easy to point to companies like Apple or Amazon as examples of great design or execution, it’s harder to hold yourself to a high bar. If your office, website, or team rituals don’t reflect the level you claim to value, your people will live out that gap, too.

Put it in writing

The most frustrated leaders I know are highly verbal. These leaders aren’t the top contributors on Slack, in Google Docs, or the company Notion. Instead, they prefer to talk out their energy and ideas in meetings, huddles, and 1:1s. But then the words disappear into thin air.

Only recently have tools like Granola and Otter made it possible to capture meeting transcripts and notes in real time. Before that, and honestly even now, most conversations vanish. How can you really move forward on something you said in a stream-of-consciousness 1:1 four weeks ago? Do you even remember what you said? Could you reference it?

The same thing happens with vision. The most frustrated founders repeat an ambiguous chorus like, “We’re building the most successful company!” but no one knows what that means. There’s no strategy, no definition, just noise, and the team is left to mull on what “success” looks like this week.

When you write it down, everything changes. People can comment, clarify, and align. They can quote your exact words back to you. Writing isn’t just documentation; it’s leadership made visible.

Create accountability

The final step is accountability, and this one’s the hardest. Hiring and firing are scary. You’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars in and out the door, not to mention the constant background fear of legal risk. But those risks grow in low-writing, low-accountability environments.

In those companies, raises and promotions happen for vague reasons. Underperformers linger so long because “they’re nice” or “it’s complicated.” It’s complicated because there’s no documented way to put your finger on what’s wrong.

If you’ve developed your taste and written things down, you now have the tools to define and measure what good looks like. You can evaluate whether someone’s helping you move forward or is just standing still.

It can be uncomfortable to admit you made a hiring mistake or that someone’s growth has plateaued, but avoiding it only keeps you stuck in the same frustration cycle. Accountability isn’t cruelty, it’s clarity. And clarity is what gives your company its edge.

Final thoughts

These three steps will take you far. Give it three to six months and you’ll start to feel the change.

They all require effort from you, which is the part most founders underestimate. Leadership is work, but not the same kind that got your first features out the door. It’s less tactical and more principled. It’s doing the slow, deliberate things that create lasting speed later.

The payoff is huge. Respect. Alignment. Excellence. More of what you want to see, and less of wanting to rip your hair out. And really, you don’t want to go bald (no shame if you are already though!). So why not give it a try?