How to Build a Team That Leads Itself

Webinar Transcript

00:04 | Introduction & Guest Welcome

Mohamed Hamad: Good morning everybody. Thank you for joining us today to the first edition of the With Wunder Webinars for 2026. Today we have a big topic that we would love to discuss. I mean, it’s something that’s close to my heart as being a founder. And it’s all around leadership and how to lead with intent and connecting with your team for their ability to also lead with intent. Introducing our special guest today, George Kiorpelidis.

He is the founder and head honcho at GKBC Leadership. He helps entrepreneurs and business owners grow their companies and become leaders in their own right. He’s got 20 years of experience in industries from all over the place, including technology, aerospace, pharmaceutical, real estate. And he also hosts a podcast, Lead Like a B.O.S.S., which is a great podcast to follow. Welcome, George, it’s a pleasure to have you.

George Kiorpelidis: Thanks Mohamed. Great to be here. And, “honcho.” I like that. I think I’m going to change my business card.

Mohamed Hamad: My last guest referred to themselves as “overlord,” so.

George Kiorpelidis: Oh, nice. All right, maybe we should get him on a call.

Mohamed Hamad: Right.

George Kiorpelidis: Fits right into our topic today.

01:28 | The Founder as a Bottleneck

Mohamed Hamad: Exactly. You know, I get the head honchos and the overlords dueling it out. Yeah. So today’s topic is growing an organization. You know, every organization out there, if as a startup founder or a small business owner, as you’re going through the motions, has a bit of a problem in that the figurehead—the founder—becomes a bit of a bottleneck after a while. As the leader, you were the original decision maker and problem solver.

But as things grow, accountability needs to be shifted over to the team. And if you don’t really work that out very well it becomes a bit of an issue. In your experience, George, how do you work with leaders to have that sense of trust within their team, to be able to offload that leadership skill? How do you imbibe that leadership into your team members?

02:26 | Are Leaders Born or Made?

George Kiorpelidis: It’s a great question and I often get that. Are leaders born or can you train leaders? Can you make leaders? Are they made or are they born? And that’s a silly question because no one is born anything. You’re almost a clean slate. It’s your environment that gives you those skills.

If your parents had that leadership mindset—if they were saying, “Johnny, what do you want to do? We can do this or we can do that. Which would you prefer to do?”—Johnny’s going to develop critical thinking. Johnny’s going to develop that mindset of “I need to actually use my mind to create my choices.” Or if it’s always “Johnny, do this, Johnny, do that,” Johnny will never learn how to do those things.

It’s the same in business. The idea is to change your mindset from “do this, do that” to empowering the team to learn how to think critically and come up with their own decisions. Most entrepreneurial leaders are really good at what they do, but they never learned anything about management tactics, management skills, or how to motivate a team. That’s usually where the gaps lie and where the friction starts.

03:38 | The “I’ll Do It Myself” Trap

Mohamed Hamad: Absolutely. Every business owner I’ve known has fallen in that trap where you’ve been the know-how behind everything for so long that sometimes you fall into the trap of “I’ll just do it myself because it’s quicker,” as opposed to offloading that and going through the initial pains of teaching someone. Then you can let go, delegate, and let their expertise come out into the conversation.

George Kiorpelidis: In one of my podcasts, I had Christina Gancz on as a guest and we talked about that extensively. It does take time, effort, and a process to create that leadership mindset. If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; you teach a man how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. But there’s that gap of time to teach them how to fish that a lot of entrepreneurs feel they don’t have.

That’s a mistake because statistics show that turnover—recruiting, training, and getting people to a positive ROI—is very costly. When people don’t feel they have that ability to lead themselves, they get frustrated and look for another job. That’s where the ROI comes from: creating that leadership capacity in your people.

05:12 | Strategies for Breaking Habits

Mohamed Hamad: How do you work through that process with a founder to break those habits?

George Kiorpelidis: First is the basic tactics. You need to create that time and space. Famous leaders like Jack Welch said 75% of their time was spent not managing the business, but managing their leaders. If the leaders do their job well, everything else is taken care of.

I had one client, a very big firm with a pool of up-and-coming partners. One targeted partner was in an office just across the aisle from the founding partner. That person had worked there for almost two years, and they had never had lunch together.

Mohamed Hamad: Oh, wow. Okay.

George Kiorpelidis: So, dedicating that time to spend with the people you want to turn into leaders is so important. Instead of telling people “do this, do that,” you’ve got to ask questions: “What do you think we should do? What do you think would be the best way of handling this?” And then giving them the freedom to actually do it. Make mistakes, do the debrief, learn from them, and move on.

06:53 | Learning Leadership While Running a Business

Mohamed Hamad: It’s the process and the time. For founders on a growth trajectory, those are two fundamental things that are hard to come by. If you come from an engineering background, how do you find the time to learn and implement these new processes while running the business?

George Kiorpelidis: When you started your business, you didn’t work an eight-hour day. Most founders I’ve worked with had a day job and spent their non-9-to-5 hours hustling. It never ends, brother. Your 9-to-5 you’re getting the widgets out the door, and from 6 to 9 you’re working on those skills to make you a better leader.

If you want to speed up that process, there are courses or you can hire a coach. But if you don’t invest the time, it won’t happen by itself. Having a common framework that everybody knows is very helpful. Companies like Netflix have a management process—guidelines for attacking problems, dealing with conflict, and managing projects. It’s like the military; they just have a way of doing things.

09:23 | Focus on Outcomes vs. Process

Mohamed Hamad: Then there’s daily task management—moving away from micromanagement and toward outcomes. What was the outcome? What’s the pushback from founders who want everything done their way?

George Kiorpelidis: It’s funny, I was talking to a client just this morning who was stuck in “how do we do this?” I told them to shelve the process for a second and focus on the outcome. Execution-oriented leaders are so focused on getting the execution right instead of identifying the problem and putting metrics around it.

If you have metrics, you don’t have to rely on your emotions; you can rely on the data. It’s like math. You need to know the problem well before you can come up with a new equation to solve it. If you do that with your team, they will get more adept at identifying outcomes and solutions. Start with the end in mind.

Mohamed Hamad: I read a quote recently: spend 90% of the time thinking of the problem and 10% on the solution. If you don’t understand the problem, you’re just hacking away at something.

George Kiorpelidis: That sounds like Albert Einstein. Or Abraham Lincoln: “If I had an hour to chop down a tree, I’d spend 45 minutes sharpening the axe.” Same idea.

12:08 | Communicating the “Big Picture”

Mohamed Hamad: Just for our guests, we will have a few minutes for questions at the end. Talking about the bigger picture—how do you communicate the “moonshot” to the team so everyone has a guiding North Star and accountability?

George Kiorpelidis: Most organizations establish the big picture well at the beginning of the year. Where things get bogged down is: “Do I know how to manage my day/week/month?” to get closer to that goal. “Improve sales” is not a goal; it’s too vague.

By breaking the big goal down into micro-tasks and KPIs—which people often hate but are necessary—you move the ball down the field. It takes work to build those, but once they’re built, they’re repeatable.

14:44 | Frameworks (OKR, SMART, and B.O.S.S.)

Mohamed Hamad: There are a lot of acronyms: OKRs, SMART. How do you get people through that first hurdle without it feeling overwhelming?

George Kiorpelidis: It’s easier to grow a startup in that space than it is to fix a well-established culture. When I go into an organization, I don’t just say, “Follow my 12-step program.” Even though I have B.O.S.S., which is my acronym, I prioritize triage. Stop the bleeding first. Identify the low-hanging fruit that can move the needle, and once the patient is stable, work on the foundational health.

16:34 | Diagnostic Tools & AI

Mohamed Hamad: You mentioned a 30-minute strategy call and a diagnostic link. How does that work?

George Kiorpelidis: I use diagnostic tools depending on the challenge—leadership, sales, or marketing. The link I provided is a general business analysis. It goes over finance, marketing, and HR practices. I feed the results into an AI tool I’ve been developing that matches problems to various methodologies and tactics. Then I go over a few ideas with the person on how they can tackle the issue.

18:13 | Q&A: Resisting the Urge to Micromanage

Mohamed Hamad: Question from Elizabeth: “How do you resist the urge to jump in when you see someone making a mistake you could easily fix? Is there a trick to becoming hands-off?”

George Kiorpelidis: Don’t wait until there’s a fire. If you wait for a fire, you’ll jump into “solve mode” rather than “train mode.” Sloan from General Motors said: “You don’t come to me with a problem unless you have three suggestions for an answer.”

Train them upfront. If Johnny brings the challenge and three ideas for fixing it, you are brainstorming the solution rather than fixing it for him. It builds the reflex to fall back on process, just like the military.

Mohamed Hamad: I love that because you’re taking away the crutch.

George Kiorpelidis: You cannot treat people today—who are armed with ChatGPT and LLMs—the way people were treated in the 30s and 40s. Simon Sinek says if you’re not the dumbest person in the room at your company, you’re hiring the wrong people.

21:18 | The Lead Like a B.O.S.S.Podcast

Mohamed Hamad: Tell me about your podcast, Lead Like a B.O.S.S. What kind of topics and guests do you have?

George Kiorpelidis: We’re going into Season 3. B.O.S.S. stands for Bravery, Optimism, Security, and Sustainability. I created it because most business training is aimed at giant companies like Microsoft or Tesla, which isn’t applicable to someone running a $5 or $10 million business. It tells practical stories about hiring a “number two,” letting go of control, and moving from struggling with payroll to growing.

Mohamed Hamad: A lot of people try to emulate Apple or IBM as they are now, forgetting they’ve been around for 50 years and almost went bankrupt in the 90s.

George Kiorpelidis: I’ve seen so many leaders resist systems and KPIs because they don’t want to micromanage. But when they finally make the switch, this look of relief comes over their face. “Oh, I can breathe.”

24:10 | Closing Remarks

Mohamed Hamad: We are at time. Connect with George on LinkedIn or find his podcast on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

George Kiorpelidis: Do the survey. It takes 20 minutes, costs nothing, and you may learn something.

Mohamed Hamad: It was a pleasure to have you. We’ll be sending out the recap video to everyone.

George Kiorpelidis: Thanks for having me. I look forward to doing it again.

Mohamed Hamad: Absolutely. See you in the next one.