Lessons from My First Year as an Executive Director

How my view of leadership changed as Hive grew

Acknowledgements: Huge thanks to my executive coach Adam, who supported me through my first year in the role, facilitated much of my learning, and offered valuable feedback on this post.

Thank you to Nathalie at Overcome. Her mental health coaching helped me recover faster from setbacks and lead with more calm and clarity.

I’m also grateful to Simon Newstead, my accountability coach at Goalswon, who helped me maintain my well-being habits this year.

I’m profoundly grateful to the Hive team — Alexia, Angel, Kevin (with thanks for his feedback on this post), Megan, Nazlı, and Therese. Working with people who take such ownership and responsibility has been central to Hive’s growth and to my own development as a leader.

Last but not least, thank you to the many leaders who shared advice and support with me this year. I’ve learned a great deal from you.

Introduction and why I wrote this post

I first came up with the idea for Hive in 2022, and met my co-founders in 2023. I worked on Hive as a co-founder before formally stepping into the Executive Director role at the beginning of 2025.

When I became Executive Director, I expected the hardest parts to be strategy, fundraising, and decision-making. What surprised me most was how much of the job involved unlearning instincts that had served me well as a founder, but stopped working as the organisation grew.

Many of the lessons below are not ideas I had never encountered before. Some are things many founders intellectually agree with. What changed was how strongly they mattered. As Hive scaled, the consequences of my actions became more visible. Behaviours that were neutral or even helpful early on began to quietly shape outcomes in ways I didn’t intend. These lessons surfaced as I realised that some of my default ways of leading, which I now recognise in many thoughtful founders, were no longer producing the results I cared most about.

1. Admitting your own mistakes builds credibility, not doubt

I used to worry that admitting mistakes would make my team think I wasn’t competent or weaken my authority when giving feedback.

What actually happened was the opposite.

When I openly share what I could have done better, why I think I made the mistake, and what I will change next time, it sets the tone. Mistakes are normal. Accountability matters. Follow-through matters even more.

Over time, this has made retrospectives more honest and reduced defensiveness across the team. It also made people feel less impostor-y. If the leader makes mistakes and still takes responsibility, it becomes easier for everyone else to do the same.

Being appropriately vulnerable builds trust. Avoiding accountability quietly erodes it.

2. Power dynamics exist even if you don’t want them to

Even if you are kind, informal, and collaborative, you still control people’s jobs, income, and career trajectories.

I’ve learned that power dynamics often show up in ways leaders don’t immediately see. Even when things feel fine from my side, people may hesitate to push back on deadlines, question plans they disagree with, or admit confusion.

It can be tempting to think this is something teams should simply get better at. In reality, people only speak up consistently in cultures where trust and psychological safety have been actively built. Creating that safety is not passive, and it is felt unevenly across a team. The responsibility for surfacing issues sits with the leader, not the team.

You can flatten hierarchy by design, but you cannot fully flatten culture. Culture lives inside people, shaped by past workplaces, social norms, and experiences of power. When formal hierarchy is reduced, the asymmetry does not disappear. It often becomes more subtle, and more dependent on how leaders show up.

This is especially important in international teams, where relationships to hierarchy vary. You can reduce structural power where possible, but pretending it isn’t there tends to make it harder, not safer, for people to speak.

3. Some decisions and conversations will hurt, and leadership requires making them happen anyway

Protecting the organisation sometimes means making decisions that upset people, including yourself.

This year, we removed two members from our community for violating our guidelines. The first time was emotionally difficult for me, but it protected the community and set a clear standard.

Another hard decision was asking my co-founder, Constance, to spin her organisation, Sentient Futures, out of Hive. Even though we worked well together, operating under one entity had become confusing as the project scaled. External advice confirmed that separation was the right move. The conversation was difficult, but grounded in mutual respect, and both organisations are now clearer and stronger.

The same applies to feedback. As an Executive Director, you often have to give feedback that is uncomfortable for both sides. In one case, I chose to have a very difficult conversation with someone I deeply respect, even though I could have avoided it. I did it because I cared about their long-term growth and the impact they could have, and because not naming the issue would have been the easier, but less honest, path.

Learning how to deliver feedback that is both caring and direct enough to truly land is a real leadership skill.

Leadership often means choosing long-term health over short-term comfort.

4. No double standards, ever

If there are rules, they apply to leadership too.

If meetings are mandatory, I attend them. If written updates are required, I submit them. If you expect people to be on time for meetings, you should hold yourself to the same standard. This was not a deliberate tactic, but mid-year feedback from the team highlighted it as unusual and deeply appreciated.

The same applies to sustainability and burnout. Leaders often talk about the importance of rest, but people take cues from what leaders actually do. I used to believe I should always be available and visibly working, and that stepping back would be read as a lack of commitment. This year, after I deliberately protected periods where I wasn’t available for work, I received feedback that it made others feel more comfortable doing the same.

People copy behaviour, not value statements.

5. Placing culture first lets you focus on impact

I’ve received positive feedback for prioritising culture building at Hive. I think that’s because many organisations prioritise strategy and beneficiaries over culture and their team. This may seem unintuitive, so let me explain.

We worked deliberately to define and embed our culture early on. Not as values on a slide, but as shared norms for how we work, give feedback, make decisions, and hold ourselves to a high bar. Over time, this has made almost everything easier. Feedback lands better. People engage with it rather than defend against it. Performance conversations are clearer and less emotionally charged.

Culture shapes how people strive for excellence. It affects how they treat each other, how safe they feel taking initiative, and whether they bring their most thoughtful and creative work to the table. It directly affects retention and whether people actually want to stay and do their best work.

Many organisations underinvest here because culture seems fluffy, or because the mission feels so important that strategy feels like the only thing worth optimising. The assumption is often that if the strategy is strong enough, culture will take care of itself.

In practice, people do the work. When culture is genuinely prioritised and maintained, strategy becomes easier to execute. People listen. They engage. They take responsibility. They care about outcomes without constant oversight.

In highly functional organisations, culture work often remains invisible and success is attributed to strong ideas or strategy. When culture is neglected, the counterfactual cost is high. Progress slows, feedback fails to land, high turnover costs $$$, and potential quietly leaks away.

Caring deeply about people is not a distraction from caring about beneficiaries. It is one of the most reliable ways to translate good intentions into real impact.

6. You shouldn’t be the best or most knowledgeable person on your team

I used to think that because I had spent the most time at Hive, I needed to be the most competent person in the room. Not out of ego, but because I felt people needed to rely on me for answers.

This turned out to be the wrong bar.

When an organisation depends on you being the best or knowing the most, progress bottlenecks around you. Decisions wait. Quality depends on your attention. Growth is capped by your capacity.

As Hive grew, I learned to build a team where many people are excellent at things I will never be excellent at. That required being honest about where I am not the strongest, being comfortable saying “I don’t know,” and genuinely celebrating when others surpass me in their domains.

At times, this triggered a fear of becoming dispensable. I now see that this is not a failure of leadership. That is the point. Skill redundancy is not inefficiency. It is what allows the work to outgrow any single person.

7. Your role shifts from doing the work to building the system

Early on, I was still largely operating as an individual contributor. I took pride in having good ideas and personally driving high-impact outcomes.

As an Executive Director, my job is no longer to have the best ideas. It is to create the conditions where the team has the best ideas. That means spending less energy proving my competence and more energy designing an environment where people feel trusted, supported, and ambitious.

This shift also means no longer needing to know everything. As the organisation grows, your role moves from holding all the details to understanding the 80/20, trusting your leadership team, and building systems that surface what matters.

If you’ll indulge a metaphor, starting an organisation is like planting a garden from seeds. At the beginning, you tend every plant yourself. As it grows, you hire other gardeners, each of whom comes to know their part far better than you ever could. Your job is no longer to know every plant, but to make sure the gardeners have what they need and that the garden as a whole thrives.

If Hive succeeds, it should not be because I was the smartest person in the room. It should be because I helped build a system and a team that could succeed without bottlenecking through me.

8. Each task you don’t delegate has an opportunity cost

If someone else can do it, you probably shouldn’t.

I underestimated how emotionally hard delegation would be. I kept thinking, “This will only take ten minutes.” Those minutes add up to days.

I now regularly review what I can delegate, I hired an executive assistant, and deliberately create space to think about leverage. The result has been more strategic clarity, better flow in my day, more mental energy and creativity.

I also had to update how I think about cost. Sometimes delegation means spending more money, or paying someone an hourly rate that looks high compared to your own. But if that frees up an hour of leadership time to focus on strategy, fundraising, or decision-making that only you can do, the trade-off can be worth it.

For example, I used to take trips with long-haul flights without a break, which made travel quite unsustainable for me. I would arrive the next day, exhausted and unable to do a proper workday. I realised that by booking a $100 hotel mid-way, I can make the trip more convenient and arrive with more energy the next day. You can buy a few hours of my time for $100, and I’m more likely to actually attend the event, so it seems worth it.

Wanting to be cost-conscious is important. But so is recognising opportunity cost. In some cases, spending a bit more money creates significantly more impact over the long term.

Delegation is not about offloading boring work. It’s about making space for work only you can do, and creating growth opportunities for others.

9. Trying to eliminate uncertainty is the wrong goal

As a founder, you operate with uncertainty by default. I assumed that once I stepped into the Executive Director role and the organisation matured, things would feel more stable and predictable.

In reality, some uncertainty decreased, but other kinds increased. As the scale of our work and potential impact grew, so did the number of decisions made in genuinely ambiguous territory, where judgment matters more than certainty. Greater opportunities for impact often come with wider unknowns, and require leaders to take thoughtful leaps rather than wait for perfect information.

Even when the strategy is clear and fundraising looks solid, uncertainty doesn’t disappear. This year, we were rejected for a significant grant we had expected to receive, which added another layer of uncertainty about where funding for 2026 would come from.

What helped me move past the sting was focusing on what we could do next. Even though our chances of securing that funding were now lower, and uncertainty about where future funding would come from had increased, mapping our options made the path forward clearer.

On a personal level, learning to relate to uncertainty differently has meant knowing when I’ve done enough. When I’ve gathered the right information, made a thoughtful decision, and acted in line with our priorities, further worrying doesn’t improve outcomes. It only drains focus and energy that would be better spent elsewhere.

A core part of my role now is knowing when to close the laptop at the end of the day and say, “I’ve done what I reasonably can.” To sleep well knowing I made the best decision possible with the information available, rather than chasing a level of certainty that doesn’t exist.

This hasn’t reduced my sense of responsibility. It’s improved my judgment.

10. Support people’s growth, even if it leads them elsewhere

I used to be afraid of people leaving the organisation. It felt disruptive, painful, and like a personal failure. As a founder, it’s easy to assume that if someone leaves, they think the organisation is no longer the best or most impactful place to be.

I’ve completely changed my mind.

At Hive, we now actively discuss people’s long-term goals, even when those goals clearly sit outside the organisation. The question is not “How do we keep you here?” but “Where do you want to be in five to ten years, and how can your time here help you get there? (while also contributing to the organization’s goals)”

That shift changes a lot. Development conversations become more honest and you become more aware of what the people at your organization want to do. Skill-building becomes more intentional. People either grow into roles that are a better fit elsewhere, or they stay longer because they feel supported and they find what they need in their growth at your organization.

This is not altruism at the expense of impact. Our goal is not retention for its own sake. Our goal is that the movement succeeds. In many cases, that means people eventually leaving Hive for roles where they can have even more leverage.

The caveat is trust. These conversations only work in high-trust environments. Without trust, people will hide their ambitions out of fear. With trust, career honesty becomes one of the strongest tools for both impact and retention.

Final thoughts

Most of these lessons didn’t come from things going wrong, but from realising that what worked at one stage of Hive’s growth no longer scaled. Leadership, for me, has turned out to be less about having answers and more about creating the conditions for good work, good decisions, and honest conversations. I’m certain I’ll look back on this year in the future and notice new blind spots. For now, I’m trying to stay curious, accountable, and focused on building something that lasts.

I also wrote about earlier steps in my journey in these two posts, which you’re welcome to check out!

• Writing about my job: Executive Director of a small international nonprofit

• Writing about my job: Co-founder of a new charity (early stage)

Question for you:

What is one thing you learned this year that changed how you work?

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Hi, I’m Sofia Balderson. I lead Hive, a global community for people working to end factory farming. I started Notes from the Margin to share the messier, more personal reflections that don’t fit in formal updates. If you care about leading, belonging, or building something that matters (especially from the edges), you might enjoy sticking around.

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