Founder's Syndrome No. 1: Passion, Power and the Problem of Staying Too Long
Knowning Self-Aware Leadership
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Hello KSKOers…
In 2025, I found myself getting interested in Founder’s Syndrome. It was an issue that kept surfacing in conversations about charities and founder-led organisations. It’s not a comfortable term. It can sound accusatory, even personal. But the more I read about it, listen and reflect, the more I realise it’s about transition, power and identity. And, ultimately, it’s about whether leaders are willing and able to adapt as their organisations grow.
Join me in exploring Founders’s Syndrome and how we can ensure organisational sustainability beyond the founder.
Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!
Check out the podcast discussion about Founder’s Syndrome: Passion, Power and the Problem of Staying Too Long
So what is Founder’s Syndrome? At its simplest, it describes what happens when the strengths that enabled a founder to build an organisation begin to limit its future. As Marshall Goldsmith said, ‘what got you here, won’t get you there’. The drive, the vision, the willingness to take risks, the personal sacrifice; all these things are often the very qualities that turn an idea into a living, breathing charity or company. Founders are frequently the beating heart of their organisations. They embody the mission. They attract supporters. They hold the story - sometimes, they are the story.
In a LinkedIn post, Wally Schmader describes Founder’s Syndrome as a set of ‘default settings’ that many founders slip into over time. At first, those traits can look positive, because let’s face it, this is what an organisation needs to get off the ground - energy, speed, conviction, but they can become problems if they’re not kept in check.
In his infographic on the ‘10 Most Dangerous Symptoms of Founder’s Syndrome’ he talks about patterns like confusing ‘my way’ with ‘the best way’, lacking trusted truth-tellers, overestimating the impact of positional power, slipping into hero or martyr mode, and avoiding the uncomfortable question: should I still be running this company? His core message is clear: self-awareness is what allows founders to rise above these habits before they permeate the organisation they worked so hard to build, limiting its ability to grow and survive.
But organisations don’t stand still. They become more complex. They develop staff teams, legal demands, compliance obligations and because of all of that, external scrutiny. What worked in the start-up phase doesn’t necessarily work at scale.
In an anonymous article in The Guardian on founder’s syndrome in charities, the writer describes how a founder’s early passion and energy gradually hardened into excessive control. Decision-making became centralised. Challenge was resisted. The charity began to feel like something personal rather than shared. Staff stopped speaking up. Turnover increased. The very person who had built the organisation was now unintentionally constraining it.
Similarly, in an article by Cranfield Trust on how founder’s syndrome can undermine the legacy of strong leaders, the emphasis is on this painful irony: founders often believe the’re protecting the organisation, when in fact they may be slowing progress and blocking talent. The article makes reference to micromanagement, outdated ways of working and reluctance to share power. It’s a stark reminds that intention and impact are not the same thing, and really do link to the second layer of the self-aware leadership definition: recognition of your impact.
Academic research reinforces this pattern. In a longitudinal case analysis published in 2024 by 横山恵子 and 東郷寛1, the authors examine a nonprofit organisation that successfully transitioned leadership after the founder stepped down. Staff surveys showed that governance and management actually worked better after the transition than before. The organisation shifted towards a stewardship model of governance, where leadership was more deliberate and decision-making became more collectively held. What made the difference, the authors suggest, was conscious intent. Leaders were thoughtful about how they navigated the transition. And in self-aware leadership terms, which means they were deliberate about regulating their behaviour and making conscious decisions to do things differently.
In a 2025 study by Andersson2 on how founders construct their inaugural boards, you can see it’s a problem waiting to happen: founders often form small boards made up of trusted friends or family. These boards provide flexibility and loyalty. They often function as working boards, heavily involved in the delivery of day-to-day operations. This makes perfect sense in the start-up phase. But the study highlights that many founders are unclear about how those boards can and should then evolve over time. Structures designed to retain control at start-up can become barriers to robust, critical and independent oversight later on.
I listened to the Third Sector Podcast about Founder’s Syndrome.
Toby Freeman from the Robin Cancer Trust speaks openly about the realities of being the founder of his charity as it aims to grow. He talks about his leadership role and how he got family members involved at the beginning. Now, he’s preparing to leave the organisation, so that it can grown and not be hamstrung by his ideas and ways of working.
Governance specialist Pesh Framjee talks about the importance of financial discipline and board independence. When you listen, the message is clear, passion must be balanced with accountability. Charities are not personal projects; they are public trusts.
I’m finding that all of this aligns closely with my work on self-aware leadership.
In The Self-Awareness Superhighway, I describe self-awareness as a three-layered process: reflection, recognition and regulation . Reflection is the ability to look inward and examine your own thoughts, values and motivations. Recognition is understanding how you are perceived and the impact you have on others. Regulation is the capacity to adjust your behaviour in light of that awareness.
Founder’s Syndrome seems to me to be a breakdown in this cycle.
Adaptability, one of the compass points in my model, becomes difficult. The founder who was once agile and experimental may struggle to shift from entrepreneur to organisational steward. Listening becomes more narrow and feedback feels threatening rather than informative. Behaviour modelling, another critical dimension, sends subtle signals throughout the organisation about whether challenge is welcome or unwelcome. Experience in the niche accumulates, but experiential learning from outside the organisation slows. The leader stops processing new information about themselves.
In my research on leader effectiveness, I examined the gap between self-ratings and others’ ratings of leaders, that being ‘what do I think of me’ versus ‘what do you think of me’. The evidence suggests that leaders who significantly overestimate their effectiveness are often poorer performers. Founder’s Syndrome frequently lives in the space between how the founder sees themselves and how others experience them. When there’s limited reflection, recognition is weak, it stands to reason that regulation can’t follow.
The practical guidance emerging from sector commentary is consistent. In the Funding for Good article on overcoming nonprofit founder’s syndrome, the advice is clear: clarify roles between board and staff, introduce checks and balances, update the constitutions and operating policies, build diverse and independent boards, and normalise conversations about power and attachment. Importantly, it acknowledges the emotional dimension. Founders are often deeply attached to ‘their baby’. Letting go is not a procedural step for a founder, it’s a huge identity shift.
There are examples of founders who have navigated this well. The founder of CoppaFeel!, for instance, stepped down from the CEO role at a point when the charity was strong, recognising that a different leadership style was needed for the next phase. That decision reflects profound self-awareness. It demonstrates reflection on personal capacity, recognition of organisational need, and regulation through a deliberate transition.
So, it seems that Founder’s Syndrome is a developmental challenge. It’s really about whether the founder can evolve as the organisation evolves. It about whether governance structures are robust enough to hold power appropriately. It about whether listening remains open and whether behaviour continues to model humility and trust.
Here’s a short, clear list of the 10 steps from the Funding For Good article on how to overcome nonprofit founder’s syndrome (Funding for Good)
10 Steps to Overcome Nonprofit Founder’s Syndrome
Clarify roles and responsibilities for both the board and staff.
Set up checks and balances so no one person has too much power.
Change systems so the founder isn’t automatically at the top of the chain of command.
Update bylaws and policies to include things like board term limits and proper oversight.
Build a diverse board whose loyalty is to the organisation, not just the founder.
Give the board’s executive committee responsibility for spotting and addressing founder’s syndrome issues.
Identify what the founder is good at and find ways they can support the organisation’s development.
Acknowledge the founder’s contributions while balancing their input with what’s best for the organisation.
Recognise that the founder often has a strong emotional attachment to “their baby.”
Help the founder see that the organisation needs to grow and function independently, with many people involved in its future.
The Last Word
Founders build something from nothing. That deserves admiration. But sustainable leadership is not about remaining indispensable; it is about creating something that can thrive beyond you. If your grip on the organisation is more a stranglehold than a guiding hand-hold, then you need to reflect deeply. The question is not whether you care enough, because most founders care about their organisations and its purpose to their core. The question is whether you are still adapting, still listening, still learning. Legacy and sustainability is not defined by how tightly you hold on, but by how ready, willing and able you are to let go.
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Nia is an expert leader who talks the talk and walks the walk. She is an academically awarded thought leader in self-aware leadership and practices self-aware leadership every single day in her role as a strategy and operations leader.
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横山恵子 and 東郷寛, 2024. Conditions for Eliminating or Mitigating Founder’s Syndrome in Nonprofit Organizations: A longitudinal case analysis from a governance perspective. 關西大學商學論集, 69(1), pp.107-127.
Andersson, F.O., 2025. Constructing the Inaugural Board: Investigating the Intentions of Nascent Nonprofit Entrepreneurs. Nonprofit Management and Leadership.