How a brilliant founder can become their company’s creative bottleneck

Lauren Templeton, a London-based performing arts entrepreneur and coach, built her company, Select School of Performing Arts, around creativity. Initially, her single-minded focus on creative decisions allowed the company to grow from three ballet classes to over 1,000 students weekly across 50 locations. However, Templeton realized her approach was unsustainable as she could no longer manage both the creative load and the team's growth.

This realization forced her to make a choice: delegate or risk both the school's success and her own well-being. Templeton's situation is not unique. Research is now exploring how the qualities that make founders successful—conviction, speed, and strong creative instincts—can also create bottlenecks in creativity within organizations.

A 2025 study found that in certain team environments, perceived creativity in leaders can lead to follower dependency, resulting in lower creative effort and reduced employee creativity. Katrina Jackson, content and communications director at Too Many Dreams, suggests that the issue lies not with creative founders themselves, but with the way they position themselves as the sole source of ideas.

This can create a self-reinforcing cycle where teams stop developing their own ideas, believing that creativity flows only from the top down. Jason Tassie, founder of Know Your Business, experienced this firsthand. Initially, he believed that being the person with the ideas was essential for a startup's success, but he realized he was unintentionally suppressing his team's creativity.

As the founder, Tassie held the institutional memory that others lacked, which made him the default decision-maker. This concentration of knowledge can be valuable, but when it remains at the top, it creates a bottleneck. Tom Skinner, managing director and cofounder of Go Up, emphasizes the commercial stakes of such bottlenecks, especially in creative companies where ideas are the product.

He warns that when teams start looking to the top for the right answer, they lose the diverse perspectives that make their agency worth hiring. Templeton found that her team had extraordinary ideas, but her answers left little room for theirs to be heard. To foster creativity beyond themselves, founders must learn to encourage others to generate ideas, recognize, select, and coordinate which ones move forward.

This requires emotional intelligence, humility, and the willingness to question whether one's idea is the strongest.