Field Notes: If You’re Still in the Stand-Up, You’re Still the Bottleneck
Inspired by my Kenyan safari, “Field Notes” are my observations from the field where my clients and I work - coaching sessions. Each field note is drawn from actual client sessions and give an insight to the personal evolution of my clients.
Location: The Executive Stand-Up
Observation: Founders say they want scale, but they’re still attending meetings built for a smaller version of themselves.
I spent part of this week inside a conversation about a 10-minute daily stand-up. Ten minutes. Every morning. Executive team sync. On paper, it’s harmless. In reality, it exposed everything.
Here’s what I’m seeing in the field.
1. The “I Haven’t Been Great About It” Tell
The founder opened with this: “I haven’t been great about attending the stand-up the last few months.” Most people hear a time management problem. I hear an identity fracture.
So I asked: “Do you need to be there… or do you feel like you need to be there?”
Silence. Then the justification: “It helps alignment.” “It keeps us on the same page.”“It addresses issues for the day.” All reasonable.
Then the truth slipped out: “If I’m not on it regularly, my engagement goes down.” There it is. The stand-up wasn’t about the team’s performance, it was a lever for the founder’s emotional engagement. That’s not scale, that’s dependency.
2. When Behavior Tells You the Truth Before You Do
He admitted something else: He’s been prioritizing other things. His coaching session. The gym. Strategic work.
That’s when I asked the sharper question: “When you start believing there are more important things, what does that tell you?”
Founders don’t drift from meetings accidentally, they drift when the meeting no longer matches who they’re becoming. Your calendar reveals your real beliefs before your mouth does. If you are consistently choosing something else over a recurring meeting, you already know it’s not CEO-level work.
You just haven’t admitted it.
3. Control, Motivation, Identity
Daily founder-attended stand-ups usually serve three functions:
Control (“If I’m there, nothing gets missed.”)
Motivation (“My presence keeps the team sharp.”)
Identity (“This is what leaders do.”)
So I said what needed to be said: “You get one stand-up per week. And it’s 15 minutes.”
Why? Because the future firm he describes (a $30M+ organization) does not include him attending daily 10-minute updates. He said it himself: at that scale, he wouldn’t be involved. Then why rehearse a structure you already know you’ll abandon?
4. The Vacation Test
He mentioned he’s especially inconsistent when he’s on vacation. I was blunt: “If you’re thinking about stand-ups on vacation, you’re not on vacation. You’re working somewhere else.” Stand-ups aren’t fire drills, they’re orientation meetings. If the firm cannot orient itself for ten minutes without you, that’s not an engagement issue, that’s a leadership architecture issue.
The Bottom Line
The stand-up wasn’t the problem, the founder’s thinking was.
Here’s the line that matters: If the answer to “Do I need to be here?” is “I’m not sure,” then you shouldn’t be there. Scale requires subtraction. If your engagement depends on proximity, you are still leading like an operator, and operators attend meetings.
Architects design systems that don’t require them.
Field Exercise: The Calendar Audit
Look at one recurring meeting on your calendar.
Ask yourself:
Do I need to be here or do I feel like I should be here?
If the firm were three times the size, would I still attend this?
Is this about performance or about my identity?
If the honest answer is identity, you’ve found your growth edge.
End of dispatch.
