In the Absence of Clarity, People Make Stuff Up
Most CEOs assume that if growth slows, the answer is to work harder. Angela Dee has spent more than 20 years watching a different story unfold. Growth does not stall because a leader ran out of effort. It stalls because clarity ran out first, and everything the business needs to move forward is still locked inside one person’s head.
In this episode of The CEO Shift, Shawndel Spader talks with Angela, founder and CEO of Ascend Strategic Advisory, about the quiet inflection point every growing company hits. Angela is a strategic advisor and executive coach who partners with leaders through growth, change, and transition, and lately much of that work has been with food and agriculture companies making careful decisions inside a genuinely uncertain market. Her gift, in her own words, is helping leaders make sense of things that feel really complicated.
One idea from the conversation lingers. When leaders fail to provide direction, people do not simply wait. As Angela put it, in the absence of clarity and direction, human nature is that people make stuff up. Teams invent their own narrative about what is happening and where they are supposed to go. The fix is not more motivation. It is a guidepost: clear priorities, clear decision rights, and clear expectations that let a team move fast without waiting on the founder.
Angela knows the trap from the inside. Early in building Ascend, everything lived in her head, from how she wrote contracts to the logic behind every decision. It worked for her as an individual, but it was not scalable, and her mental filing system was filling up fast. So she took a step back, defined what she actually delivered, and productized her services into a clear capability architecture. Once the process lived in a system rather than in her memory, other people could pull from it and deliver work the same way she would. That is the shift from being the driver of everything to building something that can run beyond you.
Her advice for the CEO wondering whether it is too early to start is refreshingly direct. Go now. Build for the size and the scale you want to be, not the size you are today. Waiting until you are already stretched, she warns, is like trying to shape concrete after it has begun to harden. If the vision is to scale and you have not laid the basic building blocks to take the first step, there is no path to walk. The groundwork is the journey.
For CEOs and agency owners who feel like the bottleneck in their own business, Angela’s message is both a challenge and a relief. The way forward is not to hold more, but to make things clear enough that others can carry it with you.
Connect with Angela:
Website: www.ascendstrategicadvisory.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amdee/
Ascend Strategic Advisory on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ascend-strategic-advisory
Angela offers a free 20 to 30 minute advisory call for leaders exploring where they might work together.