Lauren Templeton built a company around creativity.
A London-based performing arts entrepreneur and coach, she’s grown her school, Select School of Performing Arts, from three ballet classes in one studio into a 50-location organization reaching more than 1,000 students a week. At first, that growth came from a single creative source: her.
“When I founded Select, I was doing everything,” Templeton says. “Every creative decision, every concept, every direction, it came from me.”
That was the “unspoken contract” that she understood, she explains: “The team is there to implement, not to ideate.”
“I had the vision; they had the skills to deliver it. I would arrive at meetings with a fully formed plan, present it with conviction, and the conversation that followed was really just the team working out how to execute what I’d already decided,” says Templeton.
The problem was, that approach ended up being unsustainable.
“I reached a point where I simply could not hold it all: the creative load, the decisions, the pressure of being the sole source of direction for a growing team,” she says. “I had to make a choice—let other people in, or watch both the school and my own well-being suffer.”
“I thought I was leading,” she continues. “In reality, I was creating a ceiling, for them and for the school.”
Templeton’s story is not unusual. Researchers are beginning to examine the darker edge of bright leadership: how the qualities that allow founders to build something from nothing—conviction, speed, and strong creative instincts—can also determine how creativity flows and others contribute within an organization.
A 2025 study of Chinese companies explored whether, in certain team environments, increased perceived creativity on the part of a leader can be associated with greater “follower dependency”: a dynamic linked to lower creative effort and reduced employee creativity.
Katrina Jackson, content and communications director at the U.K.-based B2B communications and brand strategy agency Too Many Dreams, argues that the problem is rarely creative founders themselves.
It begins when a founder occupies the “sole visionary seat,” reinforcing the belief that creativity flows only from the top down. Teams become so focused on delivering the leader’s ideas that they stop developing their own.
“It becomes a self-feeding cycle of behavior,” she says.
The problem with having all the answers
The more a founder becomes the source of answers, the more others learn to look to them— and wait—for direction.
In a startup’s infancy, centralized creativity can be efficient. Jason Tassie, founder of the finance and operating products comparison website Know Your Business, says at that phase of a business, “making quick decisions yourself feels like a strength because speed is everything.”
But habits that begin as survival strategies have a way of becoming company culture. What begins as necessity can become expectation. Tassie saw the consequences firsthand.
“When I built my first business, I made the big mistake of believing that being the person with the ideas was my job,” he says.
He was not trying to suppress his team’s creativity. But because he was often the first to suggest a solution, people stopped offering their ideas, assuming he already had the right one.
“I realized I’d accidentally trained everyone to look upward for their ideas instead of around the business,” says Tassie.
The danger is not simply fewer ideas. It is that when a founder’s ideas become the center of gravity, others get caught in that orbit.
Filip Pesek, founder and CEO of the virtual assistant agency DonnaPro, points to one reason that orbit can form: Founders often hold institutional memory nobody else can see.
“It’s not founder creativity that shuts down other people; it’s founder context,” he says. “The founder knows why the idea failed last time and everyone else is guessing.”
That knowledge can be valuable. But when it remains concentrated at the top, the founder becomes the default decision-maker. “If you guess wrong in front of your boss twice, you stop guessing out loud,” says Pesek.
The cost can be commercial as well as cultural.
Tom Skinner, managing director and cofounder of Go Up, a digital PR agency, says the stakes are particularly high in creative companies where ideas are the product. “If every creative discussion ended with people waiting for me to decide, we’d [have] built a bottleneck rather than a business,” he says.
“The moment a team starts looking to the top for the ‘right’ answer instead of trusting their own instincts, you lose the very thing that makes an agency worth hiring: a room full of different perspectives,” Skinner says.
At Select School of Performing Arts, Templeton discovered her team’s ideas had never been missing. Instead, her answers had accidentally left little room for theirs to land.
“The people around me had been quietly holding extraordinary ideas,” she says. “I had hired them for their creativity and systematically removed every opportunity to use it.”
The Founder’s Next Creative Act
The founder’s greatest creative act may be learning how to multiply creativity beyond themselves.
Jing Zhou, professor of management and psychology at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, has spent decades studying creativity and innovation in organizations. Founders, she says, “always need to be a visionary and an idea generator.”
But as companies grow, the founder’s role expands. They must encourage others to generate ideas, while also recognizing, selecting, and coordinating which ones move forward. That requires emotional intelligence—knowing when a team needs inspiration, feedback, or space. It also requires “a healthy dose of humility,” Zhou says, and the willingness to question whether the founder’s idea is automatically the strongest.
“Founders with high emotional intelligence can sense when their team are ready for idea generation and when they need more hand-holding or inspiration,” she says. “It’s not one size fits all.”
For Michael Duffy, that judgment shows up in the way he runs creative discussions. As global creative director at the global packaging design and branding firm Equator Design, he has learned that leadership is not always about adding another idea to the room. “A strong leader knows where they add value. Sometimes that’s providing direction. Sometimes it’s removing obstacles. Sometimes it’s simply resisting the temptation to speak first,” he says.
Duffy also separates exploration from evaluation. Instead of asking people to defend their own ideas, he asks them to argue for ideas they did not create themselves. The conversation shifts away from defending ownership towards finding the strongest idea. “None of us are as smart as all of us,” he says.
Tassie at Know Your Business learned a similar lesson. He did not stop having ideas; he stopped making his ideas the starting point. He found that the less he tried to start the conversation with his own ideas, “the more innovative the business became,” he says.
But creating space for ideas does not mean simply adding more creative voices. Prithviraj Chattopadhyay, professor of organizational behavior at Cambridge Judge Business School, stresses that team composition is crucial. “The idea that more creative leaders lead to more creative products is not necessarily true,” he says.
Innovative teams need a balance between people who generate ideas and those who connect, implement, and move them forward. “Participative management with too many creatives can lead to conflict,” he says.
Beyond meetings and decision-making, founders also need to protect time for ideas to emerge. David Hieatt, founder of the premium jeans manufacturer Hiut Denim, argues that most businesses spend their time on maintenance: keeping today’s machinery running. Future growth, he says, comes from what the company calls “Magic”—protected time to imagine what comes next. At Hiut Denim, Fridays are reserved for this, bringing the team together to generate ideas.
“The founder’s job is to get the smartest, most interesting people into the room,” he says simply. “The room does the rest.”
Ultimately, the shift is not from “creative founder” to “less creative founder.” It is from being the source of ideas to creating the conditions for more of them.
For Templeton, the breakthrough at her Select School for Performing Arts was realizing she had built a creative company—one that isn’t reliant on one sole person’s creativity.
“Fifty teachers means fifty people with a deep sense of what excellence looks like in their field,” she explains. And when you have that kind of creativity in the room, the best thing a founder can do, Templeton says? “Use it.”
