It is mid-September, and the atmospheric shift in the UK business landscape is palpable. The sluggish heat of August has dissipated, the kids are firmly back in their school uniforms, and a sudden, slightly frantic “back-to-school” energy has flooded the boardroom. We are staring down the barrel of Q4, and the pressure to perform is mounting.
But there is another cultural shift happening right now. Next Saturday, September 19th, the familiar glitter and glamour of Strictly Come Dancing returns to our screens, with Emma Willis, Josh Widdicombe, and Johannes Radebe taking the reins for the 2026 launch show.
While millions will be tuning in to watch celebrities stumble through their first chaotic Latin routines, at Cameron House, we view this annual television event as one of the greatest visual metaphors for business scaling and leadership friction ever created.
We call it The “Strictly” Rub.
In business, every founder starts as a solo dancer. But to scale past your current revenue ceiling, you eventually have to learn to dance with a partner. You have to hire experts, bring in senior leadership, and partner with investors. This month, we are diving deep into the profound operational friction and ego bruising that occurs when a founder, who is completely accustomed to leading, suddenly has to learn how to follow.
Dust off your dancing shoes. It is time to look at why you keep stepping on your team’s toes.
The Solo Routine: The Comfort of Complete Control
In the genesis phase of any business, you are dancing alone.
When you first launched your company, you were the visionary, the operator, the sales director, the marketing manager, and the junior admin. You created the choreography entirely by yourself. If you wanted to spin, you spun. If you wanted to change the tempo of the business overnight, you changed it. There was no one to consult, no alignment meetings to schedule, and no one to push back on your ideas.
This phase is exhausting, but it is also deeply intoxicating for the ego. When the business succeeds, it is entirely because of your rhythm and your hustle.
The friction arises because this solo routine has a very strict revenue ceiling. You can only dance so fast and for so long before your stamina gives out. You reach a point, often around the £1M to £3M turnover mark, where sheer hustle is no longer enough. The choreography of your operations becomes too complex for one person to execute.
To break through this ceiling, you must transition from a solo performance to a ballroom partnership. You need to hire professionals.
Bringing in the Pro: The Collision of Competence
Think about the premise of Strictly. A celebrity (who is highly successful in their own right, much like a founder) is paired with a world-class professional dancer. The professional has spent decades mastering the mechanics of the cha-cha or the waltz.
What happens in week one? The celebrity, accustomed to being the master of their own domain, suddenly looks clumsy, uncoordinated, and deeply vulnerable.
When you scale your business and hire your first true “professionals”, a seasoned Chief Financial Officer, a brilliant Head of Marketing, or a rigorous Operations Director, a very similar collision of competence occurs. You are bringing in individuals who fundamentally know the steps of their specific discipline better than you do.
The Cameron & Cameron Reality Check: Many founders conceptually understand that they need to hire people smarter than them. However, very few founders are psychologically prepared for how uncomfortable it feels when that smarter person actually arrives.
When your new CFO looks at your historical accounting methods and points out massive inefficiencies, or when your new Head of Marketing tells you that the brand voice you created three years ago is actively turning away enterprise clients, it stings. Your instinct will be to get defensive. Your ego will try to assert dominance. You will want to prove that because you built the company, you still know best.
But if you hire a professional dancer and then refuse to listen to their choreography, the routine will fail. You are paying top-tier salaries for expert guidance; you must cultivate the humility to let them guide you.
The Ego of the “Lead”: Learning How to Follow
In traditional ballroom dancing, one person leads, and the other follows. The lead dictates the direction and the timing, but the follower brings the flair, the execution, and the energy that makes the routine spectacular.
As a founder, your entire identity is wrapped up in being “The Lead.” You are the CEO, the Managing Director, the boss. You are biologically hardwired to dictate the direction of the company.
The greatest operational friction we see in mid-market companies is the founder’s inability to transition into a “follower” role within specific departmental contexts.
Let us look at a classic example: The Marketing Micro-Manager. A founder realises they need to elevate their brand, so they hire an exceptional, highly-paid marketing agency or an in-house CMO. The professional builds a beautiful, data-driven Q4 campaign strategy. But when it comes time to execute, the founder cannot let go. They start leading the dance. They rewrite the ad copy, they argue over the hex codes of the brand colors, and they demand that a crucial LinkedIn campaign be launched on a Friday afternoon instead of a Tuesday morning because they “have a gut feeling.”
What happens? The founder steps squarely on the professional’s toes. The routine becomes clunky. The professional becomes frustrated, loses their creative passion, and eventually leaves.
The Cameron & Cameron Strategy: The Delegation Tango If you want to scale, you must redefine what it means to lead.
Leading the company does not mean leading every single interaction. As the founder, your job is to choose the music (the vision and the overall strategic goal) and to secure the ballroom (the resources, the budget, and the culture).
Once the music is playing, you must allow your departmental heads to lead the choreography of their specific domains.
- If it is a financial decision: The CFO leads the dance, and you follow their data.
- If it is a marketing campaign: The CMO leads the dance, and you follow their market research.
- If it is an operational process: The COO leads the dance, and you follow their efficiency models.
Learning to follow does not mean abdicating your responsibility as a CEO. It means trusting the rigorous vetting process you used to hire these professionals in the first place. It requires immense emotional intelligence to sit in a boardroom, bite your tongue, and let someone else dictate the steps.
The Rehearsal Room Friction: Navigating the Awkwardness
If you watch the training room footage on Strictly, it is rarely glamorous. It is sweaty, frustrating, and full of friction. Partners step on each other, miss cues, and occasionally lose their tempers.
The first six to twelve months of integrating a new senior leadership team will feel exactly like this rehearsal room. It will be awkward. You will accidentally step on your new Operations Director’s toes by bypassing their new CRM system and messaging a client directly. Your new Sales Director might miss a crucial cultural cue that you hold dear.
This friction is entirely normal, but how you handle it dictates whether you make it to the final or get eliminated in week three.
1. Avoid the “I’ll Just Do It Myself” Trap When the new routine feels clunky, the founder’s ultimate defense mechanism is to snatch back control. “This is taking too long to explain; I will just do it myself.” Every time you say that, you are actively destroying your company’s ability to scale. You are firing your professional partner and going back to dancing alone in the dark. Embrace the awkwardness of the rehearsal room. Let your team make non-fatal mistakes. The only way they learn the rhythm of your business is by actually executing the steps.
2. Establish the Rhythm of Communication A great dance partnership is built on subtle, continuous communication, a slight pressure on the hand, a shift in eye contact. In business, this translates to your meeting rhythms. Are you suffocating your team with daily, hours-long micromanagement calls? Or are you completely abandoning them, offering zero feedback until a massive quarterly disaster occurs?
Find the balance. Implement crisp, 15-minute weekly alignment check-ins. Set clear KPIs and let them operate autonomously within those boundaries.
The Judges’ Score: Measuring Real Performance
It is easy to get caught up in the emotional friction of changing your leadership style. But ultimately, business, like competitive dance, is judged on the final score.
If you are struggling with the transition, take the emotion out of it and look at the scoreboard.
- Since your new CFO took the lead on cash flow, have your margins improved?
- Since you stopped micromanaging the marketing team, has your inbound lead volume increased?
- Are you personally working fewer 14-hour days?
If the metrics are moving in the right direction, your ego’s discomfort is simply the growing pains of a maturing business. The friction you feel is the sensation of your company leveling up.
The Great Glenn: The Vision of the Final Routine
Our concept of “The Great Glen” is the ultimate, frictionless vision for your life and business. It is the destination you are navigating toward.
In the context of the “Strictly Rub,” The Great Glenn is a business that runs like a flawlessly executed, ten-out-of-ten ballroom routine. It is a company where the founder stands proudly on the balcony, watching their team of professionals glide effortlessly across the floor.
The founder still owns the building. The founder still picks the music. But the founder is no longer exhausting themselves by trying to dance every single part. The team moves with autonomy, trust, and exceptional competence.
To reach that Great Glenn, you must survive the awkwardness of the rehearsal room. You must confront the ego that tells you that you are the only one who can do the job right. You must learn the profound, powerful art of hiring brilliant people and then having the courage to follow their lead.
The Wee Hurdle: Your Action Step for the Week
We want to move you from theory into practice. Your Wee Hurdle this week is to perform a Founder’s Ego Audit:
- Identify the Stolen Lead: Look at your calendar for the past two weeks. Identify one specific project, meeting, or decision where you actively stepped on a team member’s toes. Where did you override an expert you hired, simply because you prefer things done “your way”?
- The Apology Tango: Acknowledge it. Go to that team member and say, “I realise I took the lead on that project when I should have trusted your expertise. Going forward, I want you to drive this.”
- The Silence Challenge: In your next senior management meeting, challenge yourself to speak 50% less than you normally do. Ask questions, listen to the professionals in the room, and force yourself to follow their conversational lead.
Stop fighting your partner for the lead. Let the professionals dance.