For the owner every decision still comes back to: four states a leader can be in, and why working out which one is yours comes first.
A leader could not switch off. Her days were meetings she was dragged into, so her own work followed her home, and the laptop went back on every night. She would have called herself busy and disciplined. Her coach read it differently. “The laptop was going back on every night,” he has written. “The problem was never the laptop.”
Plenty of people running smaller businesses would recognise that week. When the Small Business Charter surveyed senior people at UK small and medium-sized businesses in 2024, a fifth said they felt overwhelmed by what the role asks of them, and almost one in five felt the weight of protecting their employees’ jobs.
The coach was Ian Baker, Owner and Principal Coach of Ian Baker Executive Coaching Ltd, who works one to one with leaders and business owners and brings thirty years of commercial leadership to it. What he and that leader worked on, he wrote, was “the confidence and the strength to say no.” The laptop stopped coming out in the evenings.
Ian has a name for where she was. He calls it the Treadmill, one of four states in the Sovereignty Matrix, a self-assessment that came from what he kept seeing in coaching sessions. The people he most wants to reach with it are founders and owner-managers who, in his words, “may have built businesses employing 20 to 200 people and turning over anywhere from £5 million to £50 million, often without ever really considering coaching or how it might benefit them.” He wants those people, he says, to “read the article and recognise something of themselves in it.”
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What Coaching Is, and What It Gets Confused With
Ian’s starting point is that coaching “is something that almost everybody can benefit from at some point in their working life.” The difficulty, as he sees it, is that “many people still believe coaching isn’t for them.” Leaders in large corporates, he says, are often already familiar with it and may have experienced it several times during their careers. The owner-managers he describes have often never considered it.
“Sometimes it gets confused with training courses or something you do online,” he says, “whereas good coaching is about having somebody alongside you who listens, challenges you, holds you to account and, through great questions, helps you extract the best from yourself.”
In owner-led businesses, he has a view on where the weight comes from.
Why the Decisions Find Their Way Back to the Owner
“For founders in particular, it happens because at the beginning they are the business,” Ian says. “They created it. The systems and processes naturally develop around how they operate, how they make decisions and even around their own behaviours and psychology.”
Then the business grows. More people arrive with their own experience and viewpoints, but, he says, “unless genuine autonomy develops with them, final decision-making still tends to find its way back to the owner.” As he puts it on his profile: “The result isn’t lack of effort. It’s lack of space.”
“One thing I try to help leaders recognise is that giving other people ownership and autonomy isn’t the same as losing control.”
Ian Baker, Owner and Principal Coach, Ian Baker Executive Coaching Ltd
He gives one example. A managing director he worked with had become, in his words, “the focal point for almost every significant decision in the business.” They identified the managing director’s number two and deliberately created opportunities for him to spend more time away from the day-to-day operation. He spent that time, Ian says, “looking at investment opportunities and considering how he could expand the business.”
“Something interesting happened,” he says. “The rest of the company gradually developed its own rhythm without him. People became accustomed to making decisions rather than automatically looking upwards for an answer.” The leader stepping away, as Ian tells it, didn’t weaken the business. It allowed other people to step up.
Patterns like that one are where the Sovereignty Matrix came from.
Four States, and Working Out Which One Is Yours
“We could spend a lot of time trying to understand where a particular leader was mentally and what was really behind the issues they were describing,” Ian says. “Over time, I realised that their situation tended to fall into one of four recognisable states.” Which state a leader is in depends, he has written, on two things: “whether the work still means something to you, and whether you have a rhythm that holds.”
The first is Fog. The business may be operating and the leader may be incredibly busy, but, as he describes it, “they can’t really see where they are going or how they are going to move things forward.”
Then there is the Treadmill, where the rhythm holds and the meaning has gone. These leaders, he says, “are busy and often very organised, but they don’t feel as though they are getting anywhere.”
The third is Firefighting, where the meaning is intact and the rhythm is missing. These leaders care so much, he says, that “they become involved in everything. Eventually they can become the bottleneck because they are helping everybody else solve problems that the team could probably solve themselves.”
The last is Flow, which he calls “much rarer.” The owner is spending more time working on the business, and the team “isn’t constantly relying on the owner to make decisions. Instead, they are drawing on that person’s experience and knowledge where it adds the most value.”
The self-assessment that goes with it is twenty-five questions and takes, by his count, four minutes. It names the state a leader is in and “the one move that gets you out of it.” He doesn’t treat the result as fixed. “Nobody stays in one square permanently,” he has written. “The useful part is knowing which one you are in this quarter.” What Ian won’t do is make the diagnosis for someone.
“When I use the Matrix, I don’t want to tell somebody which box I think they’re in. I want them to work it out for themselves first.”
Ian, Owner and Principal Coach, Ian Baker Executive Coaching Ltd
“That’s why I like it as a diagnostic tool,” he says. “Once somebody recognises their own position, we can have a much better conversation about what is happening, why it is happening and what needs to change.”
What changes after that conversation can, in his words, “sound remarkably simple.”
What Changes First
Asked for the evidence, Ian describes what he has seen. “It’s the leader who can put the laptop lid down at half past five or six o’clock and doesn’t feel the need to open it again until the following morning,” he says. “It’s the leader who suddenly feels as though they have more time during the day because they’ve started saying no. And it’s the leader who stops automatically giving everybody the answer.”
He spends longest on the third. Instead of saying “If it were me, I’d do this,” the leader starts asking “What do you think?” or “How would you do it?” They ask people what they’re trying to achieve, listen properly to the answer and help them think the problem through until they have their own plan. Coaching Mindset is also the name of the framework he uses and of the workshops he runs, and he encourages it, he says, “in the boards, leadership teams and individuals I work with.”
“For me, one of the best measures of success is actually quite human: the business is still performing, but the leader no longer feels that they have to carry all of it themselves.”
Ian, Owner and Principal Coach, Ian Baker Executive Coaching Ltd
Ian has carried that kind of responsibility himself.
Thirty Years on the Other Side
“I think I evolved into coaching partly because I’ve experienced both great bosses and really bad bosses,” Ian says. “The great ones taught me something.”
His profile lists commercial leadership across FMCG, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, manufacturing, healthcare, professional services and infrastructure. “I’ve had to sell, negotiate, make difficult decisions, lead people and deliver results when there is pressure coming from several directions at once,” he says.
That shapes how he listens when a client describes a commercial problem. “I understand that it isn’t happening in isolation,” he says. “There is usually a customer, an employee, a supplier, a board, a financial consequence or somebody expecting an answer.” He thinks the experience helps him know when to coach and ask questions, and when somebody may benefit from experience, challenge or mentoring.
“Early in a commercial career, people are often dropped into situations without much training,” he says, “and suddenly find themselves negotiating or competing with people who have been doing it for twenty years.” The wider picture in UK management is similar: the Chartered Management Institute’s 2023 research found that 82% of those entering management positions had had no formal management or leadership training.
He names two moments of his own. One was at work: “A major production problem early in my leadership career taught me that when things go wrong, you take responsibility, deal with what’s in front of you and protect the trust people have placed in you.” The other was at home. “My dad taught me resilience,” he says. “After a serious industrial accident changed his life when I was 12, I watched him adapt to circumstances he hadn’t chosen rather than allow them to define him.”
Where Ian Is Now
Ian has run the coaching company since January 2023. Alongside it he works with boards and owners through Ian Baker Consultancy Limited, where he is Fractional Commercial Director and Adviser. He is Non-Executive Director at Oxivity Consulting and Board Advisor at Schultz Medical (UK) Ltd, and since April 2026 he has been Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Nottingham, where he provides coaching and mentoring support to students and university spin-out companies. His ILM Level 7 Certificate for Executive and Senior Level Coaches and Mentors was issued in 2024.
What’s next is the Matrix. “I want to develop the Sovereignty Matrix into a practical way of helping more leaders understand why they’re stuck, take back ownership and build businesses that don’t depend on them for every decision,” he says. The self-assessment is on his LinkedIn profile, and the people he hopes will take it are the founders and owner-managers who have built a business without ever really considering coaching.
The habit he names is the one he encourages in the leaders he works with. “I ask questions,” he says. “Even when I think I know the answer, I’d rather understand how somebody else is thinking before telling them what I think.”
Outside work there is golf. “Golf has been part of my life since I was a child,” he says. “It still teaches me that you can prepare as well as you like, but ultimately you have to play the shot that’s in front of you.”
“Perhaps that’s the biggest thing thirty years taught me: experience shouldn’t give you all the answers,” he says. “It should help you ask better questions.” Asked for the one sentence he wants people to remember him by, he gave this: “You don’t need to control everything for everything to be under control.”
Five Reflections from Ian
Which of the four states are you in this quarter? Ian’s view is that nobody stays in one square permanently, and that the useful part is knowing where you are now.
Where do the decisions go? Unless genuine autonomy develops as a business grows, he says, final decision-making tends to find its way back to the owner.
What happens when you step away? In the case he describes, the leader stepping away didn’t weaken the business, it allowed other people to step up.
What do you think? He encourages leaders to ask that before giving their own answer, and to listen properly to what comes back.
What would you have wanted to be asked? He often encourages commercial leaders to ask themselves the questions they would have loved somebody to ask them at the beginning of their careers.
From the Diary of Ian Baker
Ian Baker is a Nottingham-based executive coach and the Owner and Principal Coach of Ian Baker Executive Coaching Ltd.
| Role | Owner and Principal Coach, Ian Baker Executive Coaching Ltd. Fractional Commercial Director and Adviser, Ian Baker Consultancy Limited |
| Based in | Nottingham, England |
| Also | Entrepreneur in Residence, University of Nottingham |
“You don’t need to control everything for everything to be under control.”
Editor’s Note
The magazine chose Ian Baker because his argument is aimed at a reader who is rarely written for: the owner of a growing firm who has never thought of coaching as something for them. What convinced the editors is that his evidence is small enough for that reader to check against their own week: a laptop that stays shut, a question asked where an answer used to be given. He describes the Sovereignty Matrix as something he wants to develop further, and the piece presents it at that stage. His answers keep their qualifiers here because that is how he talks about his work.
Executives Diary, Editorial
