Insights
Most leaders test everyone except themselves
He tested his whole leadership team. Then he took it himself.
Leo Judkins, Founder, The iGaming LeaderI got off a call recently with Savvas, the founder and CEO of MrQ, for the podcast.
He said something I haven't been able to stop thinking about.
He needed to know if his head-of layer could step up to C-level. So he put them all through an executive competency test.
Then he took it himself.
“If I don't benchmark either, I'll also step aside.”
Most leaders test the people below them. Almost none test themselves first.
Why this matters so much
In iGaming, we're constantly evaluating.
We evaluate our teams. We evaluate our products. We evaluate our competitors.
We run audits, performance reviews, 360 feedback loops.
But when was the last time you put yourself through the same scrutiny you put your direct reports through?
Not "how am I feeling about my leadership" in the abstract. Or the imposter syndrome voice telling you you're not good enough.
An actual, structured, tangible assessment of whether you're the right person in the chair you're sitting in.
The kind of honest, uncomfortable look that Savvas was willing to take.
Most won't do it. Not because they're arrogant. Because there's nobody above them to ask the question.
The higher you go, the less feedback you get
This is one of the patterns I see most often. The more senior you become, the less honest feedback reaches you.
Your team won't tell you. They're managing up.
Your board sees a version of you that's curated for the boardroom.
And the people at conferences are mostly trying to sell you something.
So the feedback loop breaks. And without it, you lose calibration.
You stop knowing whether the way you're operating is actually good, or just the way you've always done it.
That's not a confidence issue. It's a structural one. The system stops giving you information about yourself the moment you reach the top.
The question most leaders avoid
"Am I still the right person for this?" is a question that requires two things most senior leaders don't have: the humility to ask it, and someone honest enough to answer it.
Savvas had the humility. And by putting himself through the same test as his team, he created the conditions for an honest answer.
But the question doesn't need to be that dramatic. It can be smaller.
"Am I still making decisions at the speed this business needs?"
"Am I spending my time on the things that actually matter, or am I still firefighting from three years ago?"
"If I hired someone to replace me tomorrow, what would they do differently?"
These are questions that sound simple but almost nobody asks out loud. Because there's nobody safe enough in the room to ask them to.
The question isn't whether you're good enough. It's whether you have anyone around you honest enough to tell you.
You can hear more from founders navigating this on the iGaming Leader podcast, including Nigel Eccles, co-founder of FanDuel, on the early days of building his first business — for months after launching it, he had to decide every morning whether he was a visionary or just delusional.