Session Speaker: Caroline Broad
Theme: Leadership Reset and The Public Sector/Business Relationship
Date: Autumn Trimester - September 2026
At our first Magma session of 2026/27, our speaker Caroline Broad brought a challenge around control, resilience and adaptability. Members tested that thinking against the realities of leading growing businesses, particularly what happens when uncertainty increases and the instinct is to hold on more tightly.
This article explores the implications for SME leaders.
When the business gets harder to read, taking more control can feel like the responsible thing to do.
You get closer to the detail. More decisions come across your desk. You check more, approve more and intervene earlier. Perhaps you tell yourself it’s temporary, just until things settle down.
For many founders, that instinct has served them well. In the early days, control protects standards, cash, customers and reputation. The problem comes when a behaviour that helped build the business becomes the behaviour that restricts it.
The consequences aren’t limited to the leader becoming busy or tired. If too much depends on one person, the business starts learning to wait. People refer decisions upwards. Initiative becomes riskier than asking permission. The leader sees more operational detail but can lose the space to see the bigger picture.
And when pressure increases again, the natural response can be to grip even harder.
That is where control stops being a source of resilience and can start undermining it.
Caroline Broad’s central challenge was not that control is bad. It was that leaders need to become much more deliberate about what they control, what they enable and what they are prepared to let go.
Her starting point connected personal resilience with organisational adaptability. Resilience was framed as the ability to cope with and recover from difficult situations. Adaptability is the willingness and ability to change and adjust. Both matter when leaders are operating with uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.
But adaptability carries a cost. Constant small shifts, changing priorities and incomplete information create cognitive load. For a leader already carrying too many decisions, asking the organisation to become more adaptable while continuing to sit at the centre of everything creates an obvious tension.
Caroline put the counterpoint simply: “Trust is the antidote to control.”
That doesn’t mean blind trust or walking away from responsibility. It means creating enough clarity, capability and confidence for decisions to happen without the leader needing to be involved in every one.
She also used the idea of moving between the dance floor and the balcony. Leaders need to be close enough to understand what is happening, but capable of stepping away from day-to-day activity to notice patterns, bottlenecks and systemic issues.
That distinction matters. Being deeply involved isn’t the same as having useful oversight.
The discussion exposed an uncomfortable pattern that will be familiar in many SMEs.
A founder wants people to take more responsibility but continues to make the important decisions. They want initiative, but step in quickly when somebody approaches the problem differently. They want a stronger leadership team, but retain information or relationships that make independent judgement difficult.
Over time, the business adapts to the leader.
People become very good at knowing what needs approval. They learn when to defer. Decisions move through informal hierarchies because that feels safer than being wrong. What looks like a people problem can actually be a system responding rationally to the way leadership has been exercised.
The same issue can be seen in how leaders spend their time. Caroline asked people to consider the balance between running the business, delivering its product or service, and developing its future.
That creates a useful test for any owner-manager. If most of your capacity is consumed by running and delivering, who is doing the developing? Who is looking beyond the next deadline, customer issue or operational decision?
The bottleneck is not always a broken process. Sometimes the bottleneck is a leader whose involvement once created value but now limits the organisation’s capacity to think and act without them.
Reducing control is not the same as relinquishing responsibility.
In fact, it can require more disciplined leadership. If somebody else is going to make a decision, they need to understand the outcome being sought, the boundaries around it and where genuine non-negotiables sit. Without that clarity, delegation can become abandonment, followed by disappointment when the result isn’t what the leader expected.
This is why trust cannot simply be demanded.
Caroline’s discussion of trust included credibility, reliability and a willingness to disclose your own thinking and uncertainty. Trust also has reciprocity. A leader is effectively saying, “I’m prepared to trust your judgement here,” while asking others to trust the direction and framework they’ve established.
That changes the leadership task. The question becomes less about how to maintain control and more about what conditions allow somebody else to exercise good judgement.
It also changes how leaders need to behave when something goes wrong.
Caroline distinguished between complex, intelligent and preventable failures. That matters because treating every failure as evidence that greater control is required creates exactly the dependence culture leaders say they want to avoid. Some failures happen because the environment is complicated. Some come from genuinely trying something new. Others were avoidable and need to be owned and learned from.
The leadership response needs to recognise the difference.
People will also pay close attention to how the leader responds under pressure. Panic, anger, blame or immediately taking everything back communicates something about what is safe next time. So does the ability to acknowledge what happened, deal with the consequences and move forward without pretending the difficulty didn’t exist.
This was where Caroline’s treatment of resilience became more useful than the familiar idea of simply being tougher.
Resilience isn’t denying the impact of a difficult event. It involves acknowledging it and learning from it. Nor is it about dwelling indefinitely on what went wrong. The aim is to recover with more understanding than you had before.
That requires some tolerance for discomfort.
Letting somebody else decide will occasionally mean watching them choose a route you wouldn’t have chosen. Asking for genuine feedback may reveal an impact you didn’t intend. Creating space for other people to lead can initially make the organisation feel messier rather than more controlled.
The session described this as the messy middle. It is easy to say that you want a more adaptable business. It is harder to remain committed to that ambition while people are still learning how to operate differently.
There is a wellbeing dimension too. Caroline referenced an FSB article explicitly connecting burnout with business revenue. The wider point is important for SME leaders: the resilience of the person running the business cannot be treated as separate from the resilience of the business itself.
A company that requires its owner to remain permanently alert, permanently available and permanently involved in its important decisions may look controlled. It is not necessarily resilient.
Towards the end of the session, the group worked with a set of questions that a board might ask a managing director if it wanted assurance that they were continuing to grow as a leader.
There were questions about giving up control, responding to failure, disconnecting from the business and defining leadership success.
One stood out:
“What do you see that I am not aware of?”
It sounds simple, but it cuts directly into the problem.
Control is partly about decisions. It is also about perspective.
If the leader remains the person who interprets the information, defines the problem and decides the response, then letting somebody else execute the decision isn’t really letting go. The business is still operating inside one person’s field of vision.
Asking what other people see introduces the possibility that the leader’s picture is incomplete.
That requires confidence. It also requires enough humility to accept that the value of another perspective may only become obvious after you’ve stopped defending your own.
Perhaps this is where the idea of 360-degree feedback becomes most valuable. The purpose is not simply to gather feedback.
It is to hold up a mirror. And, importantly, the mirror is held by other people.
They can see behaviours, patterns and impacts that are almost impossible to observe from inside our own intentions. A trusted leadership team, colleague or peer group can therefore provide something self-reflection alone cannot: a view of how our leadership is actually being experienced.
In that sense, the question “What do you see that I am not aware of?” is more than an invitation for feedback.
It is an invitation for somebody else to hold the mirror.
Several threads from the session met at that point: trust, feedback, adaptability, resilience and the willingness to see ourselves through somebody else’s eyes.
The test of resilience in an SME may not be how firmly the leader can hold the steering wheel when conditions become difficult.
It may be whether the business can continue to think, decide and adapt without the leader tightening their grip every time uncertainty rises.
That doesn’t remove accountability. It asks something harder of leaders: to distinguish between the control that genuinely protects the business and the control that mainly makes them feel safer.
And perhaps it asks one further thing. To recognise that we cannot always judge our own leadership from the inside. Sometimes we need other people to show us what they see.
As businesses grow, both distinctions become increasingly important.
The question is not simply whether you can let go.
It is whether you have built a business that allows you to, and whether you are willing to see yourself clearly enough to know when you should.