When I was 10 years old, I went on my first sleepover to my Irish Catholic friend’s house. Approaching the carport, I heard a commotion and was shocked to see the whole family of ten gathered, watching their two youngest kids in an all-out fist fight, and Mom and Dad making bets with the others on the outcome!

I consider myself to be somewhat “old school.” That term carries different connotations, and whether it’s good or bad depends on how you mean it. I’m proud of my old school leanings because it means I respect good traditions, appreciate my heritage, and stick with tried-and-true ideas that have consistently led to success in the past.

But there is another kind of old school thinking that, if you’re a business owner or entrepreneur, can lead to extinction. Sticking to old ideas that have proven not to work well can make you a dinosaur. I’ve seen people lose their businesses that way while their competition flourished.

Here are three old-school leadership ideas that will stifle your business growth, and how to break free of them.

In my 30-plus years as an entrepreneur, I’ve faced some pretty tough situations in business.  We all do.

The hardest thing I’ve ever done is to counsel someone facing what seemed like an impossible crisis. Like the time one of my clients lost millions of dollars in one year and had several none-too-happy bankers considering calling their loans.  Or the client who realized that a long-time partnership was not going to work out and they were faced with a messy business divorce.  Or the client who was betrayed by a trusted employee who departed with a significant customer, instantly putting the future of the business and his family’s financial security in jeopardy.

I frequently encounter this odd, paradoxical statement in my work. My clients specifically hired me to teach them how to run their businesses in a way that will give them more time and freedom, yet when I try to schedule sessions with them, they often tell me they’re “too busy.” They’re so busy trying to do that they “don’t have time” to learn how to do those things better, faster, and with less effort.

I recently checked in on a new client a couple of weeks after their first session with me, and their Integrator was over the moon about how much they’d been accomplishing in their weekly meetings. He said, “We got 10 issues resolved today! Normally, we’d have been hung up and lucky to solve one, but every week, we’re solving things that have been hanging around for months or years, and worse still, the same problems kept recurring. But now we’ve solved them for good, and we can focus on what matters: making our customers happy and growing our business.”