Running a business is essentially signing up for a continuous series of problems to solve.
That makes managing uncertainty the constant reality of small business leadership.
Every day as a small business owner, you're making high-stakes decisions with incomplete information. You're navigating challenges without a clear roadmap. You're building something meaningful while the landscape shifts beneath your feet.
Exciting, isn’t it?
It's certainly not for the faint of heart.
Your small business leadership role requires exceptional mental agility to handle this uncertainty during every phase of growth, but especially during that critical plateau between initial survival and sustainable scale.
You’ve got to be mentally athletic.
Think of the best business owners you know. The ones who make clear decisions under pressure. Who adapt fast, stay grounded, and inspire confidence. What they have in common isn’t just experience. It’s mental sharpness. Resilience. Agility. Clarity.
To lead effectively through uncertainty, you must continuously develop your mindset, refine your leadership approach, and evolve how you see yourself as a business leader.
You want to know how they’re so good at it?
They work on it. They train for it.
Being mentally athletic as a leader comes from strengthening specific muscles - just like physical fitness.
I've found that small business owners can build this kind of leadership by developing what I call the six essential Leadership Muscles.
These six capabilities help you perform at a high level, lead through chaos, and scale without losing control. They give you the range, clarity, and stamina to operate like a mentally athletic leader.
Think of leadership muscles as the core capabilities that give you the strength and flexibility to effectively guide your small business, your team, and yourself through uncertainty.
The six Leadership Muscles are: stakeholder awareness, critical thinking, communication, adaptability, a growth mindset, and agency.
These capabilities enable you to navigate the complexity and constant change of business ownership. These capabilities are required of you as a leader to take your business from survival-mode to a scalable small business.
When your leadership muscles are strong and working in harmony, their individual contributions might not always be obvious, but their combined effect creates resilient, effective leadership.
Strengthening these six leadership muscles is an ongoing process, and they are absolutely essential to building a lasting small business that can successfully scale beyond the startup phase.
Stakeholder awareness is your ability to identify who has a vested interest in a specific situation or more broadly in your business decisions, and understand their unique perspectives. In a small business, key stakeholders typically include employees, clients, suppliers, and community partners. They might also include family members, competitors, and other businesses in your network.
With strong stakeholder awareness, you synthesize these varied perspectives into a comprehensive view of your business landscape. You transition from seeing challenges through only your lens to gaining a near-360-degree perspective. This expanded viewpoint enables more informed decisions that consider the needs and concerns of everyone impacted by your small business.
Every stakeholder comes with their unique worldview. They have a set of distinct interests, objectives, and concerns. The better you are at being able to see situations from their vantage point, it will help you anticipate reactions and align their goals with your business objectives.
Why Stakeholder Awareness Matters in Small Business Leadership: For small business owners navigating the gap between survival and scale, stakeholder awareness functions like an early warning system, helping you navigate complex situations.
It provides invaluable insights when evaluating the risks and rewards of decisions. That enables you to craft approaches that address the diverse needs of various stakeholders while still moving your business forward.
Consider an architecture firm planning to shift from hourly billing to value-based pricing. A principal with limited stakeholder awareness might only consider how this change benefits the firm's profitability, overlooking how clients might perceive the change. A leader with deeper stakeholder awareness would understand the varied perspectives: established clients might worry about unexpected costs, project managers might fear scope creep, and junior architects might wonder how their performance will be measured. This comprehensive understanding allows the leader to implement the change with proper communication, clear guidelines, and transition plans tailored to each stakeholder group's concerns.
Another Example: Imagine a manufacturing supply company deciding whether to consolidate their warehouse operations. The operations team wants centralization for efficiency and cost savings. The sales team is concerned about delivery times to certain regions. Long-time employees fear job relocations. Local community leaders worry about job losses. Customers in distant regions anticipate longer lead times. A leader with strong stakeholder awareness would map out all these perspectives, prioritize their importance, predict potential reactions, and develop a strategic approach that addresses the most critical concerns while still achieving the business objective – perhaps through a phased consolidation with regional distribution partners or hybrid model that preserves service levels.
Critical thinking is your ability to manage fast-moving, complex, ambiguous situations while balancing short-term needs and long-term vision. As a small business leader, you rarely have all the information you'd like, and you certainly can't predict the future, but you still must solve problems and make decisive choices that move your business forward.
Critical thinking helps you to respond rather than react.
Small business leaders constantly face situations fraught with complexity and uncertainty. Critical thinking enables you to dissect these situations, ask relevant questions, and weigh the advantages and disadvantages of different courses of action.
Why Critical Thinking Is Essential in Small Business Leadership: Strong critical thinking equips you to be both proactive and responsive as you grow your business. It helps you develop mental roadmaps that anticipate challenges and create contingency plans. This foresight enables you to respond effectively to unexpected obstacles rather than being blindsided by them.
Imagine a family-owned commercial cleaning business that suddenly loses three major contracts within two months. The immediate reaction might be to reduce prices or blame the sales representative. Some kind of surface level response.
A leader with strong critical thinking examines the situation holistically. They gather data: review client exit interviews, analyze competitor offerings, evaluate metrics, etc. This objective analysis might reveal that the lost clients all had new managers who prioritize environmentally-friendly cleaning practices. Rather than mistakenly cutting prices, the business owner identifies the underlying pattern and develops an eco-friendly service line to address the actual challenge. They kept pricing intact while adding a new differentiator.
Leadership communication for a small business goes well beyond simply sharing information. It’s not just a transactional box to be checked. Communication has to provide clarity, direction, and create a sense of unity that aligns all your stakeholders toward common goals.
Communication in small business leadership is comparable to a lighthouse guiding ships through fog. It has to communicate what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what actions are to be taken. If you’re going to scale a small business, that’s what you’re doing when you’re clarifying, refocusing, and reminding everyone of the vision and priorities.
Why Communication Is so Important in Small Business Leadership: Effective communication builds trust and ensures everyone remains aligned with your business goals and vision, especially during the challenging transition from survival to scale. As the leader, you are the one that guides your stakeholders through uncertainty.
An engineering firm needs to delay a major project due to unexpected permitting issues. A leader with strong communication skills would handle this delicate situation by first gathering complete information about the causes and timeframes - the information they know is needed to provide a substantive update to the other stakeholders.
They would then personally call the client, taking responsibility while clearly explaining the unforeseeable circumstances, providing a revised timeline with built-in contingencies, and detailing the steps being taken to prevent similar issues.
Internally, they would hold a town hall meeting where they'd acknowledge the team's frustration, explain how this affects quarterly goals, outline how performance metrics will be adjusted, and reframe the challenge as an opportunity to strengthen risk management processes.
By communicating with clarity, transparency, and appropriate context to each stakeholder group, they turn a potential crisis into a moment that actually builds trust. They’ve shown the stakeholders what to expect out of the firm in a difficult situation: professionalism.
For small business leaders, adaptability represents your capacity to adjust to changing conditions while maintaining forward momentum. It’s 2025. Everyone’s world moves fast, especially that of a small business owner. Adaptability is an essential leadership muscle for navigating the path from survival to scale.
Being adaptable means having the flexibility to respond to changes without becoming rigid or resistant. It involves recognizing when established methods are no longer effective and having the courage to break organizational inertia by exploring new approaches.
Why Adaptability Is Critical for Business Leaders: Adaptability allows you to adjust your strategies in response to market shifts, competitive pressures, and new opportunities. An adaptable leader can embrace change, learning continuously from experiences, and improvising effectively as situations demand.
Everyone during the pandemic.
David and his wife were running a business that had hit a ceiling. They had a great product, but it depended entirely on them and left them with no time for their young kids. We got David to shift from a reactive, high-effort model into a systemized business aligned with David’s strengths. By embracing adaptability, David nearly 5X’d revenue, added recurring income, and reclaimed his time with family. You can read David's case study here.
That kind of flexibility and willingness to change is exactly what allows our clients at Redesigned.Business to implement scalable growth strategies that fit their unique strengths.
A growth mindset represents the fundamental belief that you and your team can develop your abilities and intelligence, that you can improve. It's the driving force that propels you and your business toward realizing your full potential.
Having a growth mindset as a small business leader means viewing challenges as opportunities for development rather than insurmountable obstacles. You push beyond perceived limitations and strive for improvement in yourself, your team, and your business processes.
Why Growth Mindset Matters in Small Business Leadership: A growth mindset transforms business challenges into opportunities and mistakes into valuable learning experiences. It nurtures an environment of continuous learning and improvement.
In a business led with a growth mindset, feedback is welcomed. Failure isn’t seen as a dead end but, it’s more of a necessary step in the journey.
When reading this article, are you looking for ways you can grow as a leader? Or do you believe you're either born a leader or you're not?
A residential construction company that experienced a newly built retaining wall collapse after heavy rain.
A leader with a fixed mindset might defend their work, blame unusual weather patterns, or point fingers at individual employees.
In contrast, a leader with a growth mindset would see this failure as an invaluable learning opportunity. They'd conduct a post-mortem analysis, bring in external engineering experts to identify design weaknesses, revise their protocols, implement new quality checks, create additional training based on the incident, and openly share these learnings with clients as evidence of their commitment to excellence.
The failure went from being a likely source of shame to a catalyst for company-wide improvement and innovation and strengthened their value prop.
A coaching firm had a full client roster and strong results but felt trapped in a high-effort delivery model. They knew there was much more potential for what they had, they just hadn't cracked the code. Rather than stay stuck, they leaned into experimentation. We co-designed an advanced peer group program for their top 20% of clients, leveraging assets they already had. They got some killer results, but the main point is that they saw past the current state and recognized there was improvement that could be made. (Which turned out to be 25X lift in lifetime customer profit). That’s the reward for a mindset willing to try something new.
I don't want to turn this into an ad, but it warrants mentioning: the owners and entrepreneurs who come to Redesigned.Business all have that in common. They are firm in their belief that the business could be doing more than what it is. And I mention that because that's a great sign of a growth mindset.
High agency represents your belief in your ability to shape outcomes through deliberate action, even when facing adversity.
It's the internal engine that drives you forward despite obstacles.
It means having an internal locus of control and taking proactive steps to achieve your desired results rather than reacting to circumstances.
Small business leaders with high agency don't passively wait for favorable conditions; they actively create them. They demonstrate determination and ownership over their actions and outcomes. Having high agency means refusing to blame external factors for setbacks but instead taking responsibility and believing in your power to effect positive change.
Why High Agency Is Critical in Small Business Leadership: High agency is essential because it instills a relentless drive to find solutions and advance despite adversity.
It's also largely about resilience - the ability to recover quickly from setbacks and maintain forward momentum.
And as I explain below, I consider high agency to be absolutely vital for small business success.
A local print shop owner is getting crushed by digital options and bargain prices offered by big-box stores.
A low-agency leader might bemoan the changing market, blame technology, and gradually watch their business decline.
A high-agency owner would take decisive control of the situation. They might invest in specialized equipment to offer services the big-box stores can't, create partnerships with local designers and marketing agencies, and start using part of their space as a community hub for creative workshops and events.
Rather than being victimized by the situation, they identify opportunities to create new value and reinvent their business. They view obstacles as challenges to overcome rather than reasons to surrender.
Brian had a great business concept and customers loved it, but everything else seemed to be working against him and he was 60 days away from shutting down. Instead of surrendering, he doubled down. He knew he had to change the situation or his time was up. We worked together to restructure his team, productize his expertise, and build recurring revenue. He scaled 5X and became the largest in his niche. That transformation didn’t start with tactics, it started with agency. (Read Brian's case study)
Just as with physical muscles, all six leadership muscles are essential and serve specific purposes. They all require consistent exercise and challenge to strengthen and grow. And similar to our physical bodies, it might be possible to compensate if one muscle is slightly underdeveloped.
However, there's one leadership muscle that I firmly believe no small business owner can successfully scale without.
I've worked with thousands of business owners over my career, and here's one of the things I've become very confident in saying: without high agency you won't make it in business.
Here's why: The path ahead of you is never linear or obstacle-free. It requires navigating ambiguity, overcoming resistance (both internal and external), and persisting through inevitable setbacks. It’s just one obstacle after another. If a person doesn’t have high enough agency to take responsibility for turning the obstacles into opportunities, and the grit to weather the obstacles when they just keep coming - I don’t see how they can be successful.
I've seen business owners with brilliant ideas, solid strategies, and excellent technical skills ultimately stall because their sense of agency wasn't strong enough to carry them through the difficult middle stages of transformation.
I've also seen owners with perhaps less going for them, but agency in abundance, overcome obstacles and build thriving, scalable businesses.
The good news is that like all leadership muscles, high agency can be strengthened. It takes intentional practice, guidance and support. Every time you take action despite uncertainty, persist despite setbacks, or create opportunity despite constraints, your agency muscle grows stronger.
Let me say this: if you have any type of vision or ambitions for yourself and your business, you will not reach them without working on your leadership.
Strengthening these six leadership muscles is how you build the mental athleticism needed to guide your business effectively. It's how you develop the focus, resilience, and clarity needed to grow through the stages of entrepreneurship rather than just try to survive them.
Leadership is a skill. Mental sharpness is a habit. And just like any others that you want to do well, it takes practice.
When you start being intentional about strengthening your stakeholder awareness, critical thinking, communication, adaptability, a growth mindset, and high agency, you’re leveling up your ability to handle the uncertainty and complexities of running your business.
That’s when you’ll be leading like a mentally athletic business owner.
This is my updated overview of the Six Leadership Muscles. I first shared the Leadership Muscles in 2019 for Fitness Revolution, and then later published this article.
My philosophy on leadership has been heavily influenced by Art Petty and George Mack. Art is the executive coach who showed me how to take my leadership intuition and frame it into something I can be intentional about. And George Mack blew my mind with his perspective on agency, which helped me pull all of this into focus.
Nick Berry is an accomplished entrepreneur and CEO, whose track record includes founding and leading numerous companies since 2002.
After his most recent exit he started Redesigned.Business to mentor and coach to other entrepreneurs and business owners who are looking for a trusted (and proven) advisor.
Among peers, colleagues, staff, and clients, Nick has been referred to as both 'The Business Guy' as well as 'The Anti-Guru', due to his pragmatic approach and principled leadership.
He shares his insights and lessons learned, along with those of his expert guests,
on his podcast, 'The Business Owner's Journey'.
