Leadership Hurdles You Must Overcome to Unlock Your Team’s Value

Beth Torres
Oct 28
4 min read

TL;DR

Even the most passionate, well-meaning leaders sabotage growth when they cling to outdated beliefs about control, culture, and capability. In this post, we break down the 5 biggest leadership hurdles, beliefs, and practices that quietly stall teams, suppress innovation, and kill momentum. If you’re serious about building a resilient, scalable business grounded in trust, empowerment, and operational excellence, consider this your wake-up call.

Woman in black sportswear running up concrete stairs, casting a shadow. Bright sunlight and yellow lines on pavement enhance the energetic mood. — Image from Wix

Top 5 Hurdles to Overcome

Misaligned teams, fragile operations, and leaders lying to themselves about what’s going on are what kill a business. These hurdles aren’t always malicious; they’re often rooted in fear, blind spots, or legacy habits. Either way, they silently sabotage growth, weaken culture, and prevent you from building a high-performing team that actually delivers.

So let’s call them out.

1. Hurdle: “I’m the smartest person in the room.”

Why it matters: If you’re the smartest in the room, you’ve either picked the wrong room or you’re not building the team you need. Leadership isn’t about being the hero; it’s about curating brilliance, empowering others, and making space for ideas better than your own.

Reality check: Growth-minded leaders don’t hoard knowledge. They build cultures of trust, invite challenge, and enable others to drive results.

Action step: Audit your last five leadership meetings. How often did you listen rather than lead? How often did someone else's idea get picked up?

2. Hurdle: “I can fix everything myself.”

Why it matters: This brand of martyr leadership might feel productive, but it limits you, burns you out, and keeps your team from growing. High-performing teams emerge when leaders stop micromanaging and start building teams that can execute without them in the room.

Reality check: You don’t scale by being the fixer; you scale by being the architect of a team that fixes, builds, and executes with autonomy.

Action step: Identify one area where you step in and “save” a problem. Use that as a coaching moment instead to delegate, equip, and let your team own it.

3. Hurdle: “Our culture is fine.”

Why it matters: This might be true, or it might be the quiet trap. A culture that’s just okay often hides suppressed voices, a lack of accountability, and low psychological safety. A high-performing culture is about clarity, accountability, purpose, and safety. This is more than smiling faces at lunch.

Reality check: Great culture is an outcome of intentional leadership. Check out this HBR article on the Secret to Building a High-Performing Team.

Action step: Use this one-minute test: Ask five team members what “high performance” looks like here and how they know when they’re doing it. If answers vary widely, you have work to do.

4. Hurdle: “We’re too busy to innovate right now.”

Why it matters: Translation: “We’re too disorganized to focus on what actually moves the needle.” Innovation is a discipline. Companies that win are led by leaders who carve out time to think, test, and evolve.

Reality check: If you’re not prioritizing innovation, someone else is. High-performing teams demand space to create, and you’ve got to lead the permission.

Action step: Block a 2-hour “innovation sprint” on your calendar this week with no operational meetings. Invite three people from very different roles and ask: “What assumption are we making that might be wrong?”

5. Hurdle: “I can do it later.”

Why it matters: This one is merely procrastination in leadership’s clothing. Ignoring small fires or putting off important decisions doesn’t keep you safe. It compounds the problem into a crisis.

Reality check: High-performing leaders act decisively. If it matters, it gets your attention today, and not when things break.

Action step: Identify one decision you’ve delayed. Write it down. Set a deadline. Hold the person (including you) accountable for the outcome.

Why This Matters for Your Workforce

Each of these hurdles erodes one critical thing: value creation. Your workforce delivers when they’re aligned, empowered, trusted, and coached, all orchestrated by a leader who sees their potential and removes obstacles.

When leaders cling to these outdated beliefs, productivity stalls, turnover rises, engagement drops, and growth becomes sporadic. When leaders face them head-on, culture rises, team capability expands, and the business grows with intention.

Moving Forward

Be radically honest: Pick one of these lies/hurdles. Be vulnerable with your team about it.
Design one experiment: Change one habit for 30 days (e.g., delegate one problem each week, hold one feedback session, carve out thinking time).
Measure the impact: What surfaced? What changed? What stayed the same?
Embed the shift:
Build the habit into leadership rhythms (weekly one-on-ones, leadership top-team reflection, team feedback loops).

At Apexium Growth, we partner with founders, executives, and emerging leaders to align strategy, structure, and culture, so your business can scale without breaking. We build the frameworks that transform leadership obstacles into growth accelerators.

Ready to take action? Explore the Apexium Program, which offers an outcomes-based approach to help you accelerate your progress. Or Book a Discovery Call and let’s build your high-performing, resilient team together.