Thoughts on Leadership, Vision, and Becoming Your Own Captain

There’s a line Mellody Hobson shared in her interview with Emma Grede that’s been sitting with me. She said something along the lines of:
“When I initially started my entrepreneurship journey, I constantly used to worry about whether I was just a good executor, a really strong instruction taker, and often wondered if I lacked vision.”

That kind of honesty stopped me in my tracks.

I found myself rewinding that sentence an unholy number of times, almost as though it was getting clearer each time I heard it. Mellody Hobson, co-CEO of Ariel Investments, board member at Starbucks, and one of the most respected business minds in the world, once worried she didn’t have vision. She feared she might just be great at getting things done for other people. What a sobering realisation that was.

For those of us who transition from corporate or leadership roles into entrepreneurship and suddenly realise the rules have changed, this hits hard.

In previous roles, I knew how to lead teams, present in rooms filled with EXCO members of globally recognised brands, deliver results, and land campaigns with precision. I was the one people came to when they needed things done, said, managed out of crisis, or to help them save face. Give me a brief, and I’d knock it out the park.

So when we finally launch something of our own, the silence can be deafening.
No one is a sounding board for decisions [luckily, though, I have a co-pathner].
No one is handing down the goals.
It’s your ship now. Your compass. Your sea.
It’s you. All you.
And that’s terrifying.
I found myself asking:

Do I know how to set the vision, or have I just learned how to deliver on someone else’s? But then the thought hit me: maybe vision isn’t always a lightning bolt. Maybe it starts as a whisper – a sense, a direction, a quiet what-if.

Maybe the greatest visionaries are simply the ones who were brave enough to stay in the room with their own ideas a little longer. The ones who chose to back themselves, even before they fully saw the path unfolding.

Here’s what I know about you and me. Because even in the uncertainty, there are signs you’re on the right path:

• We have grown teams that believe in what we’re building.
• We have delivered above expectations, even without guardrails or strict budgets.
• We have held it together on the days we badly wanted to walk away.
• We have won awards and have the accolades to show for it.

So no, we’re not just good at taking instructions. We are learning how to hear our own voice above the noise. We are learning to trust that the ability to execute is not a weakness. It is a foundation. And vision can grow on that.

Perhaps the next time you’re wrestling with whether you have vision, remember this;
You are not late to the visionary table, so please give yourself the space and courage to shape one.