Seth Godin wrote a blog post a while back called "The Illusion of Control." You can read the whole post here. The gist is that we need to come to grips with the reality that we actually have no control over the outcomes of our actions. In fact, all we are in control of are the actions themselves. We can only influence the outcomes.

This is particularly frustrating for successful business owners who are scaling their organizations. Making the change from doing everything to merely influencing everything is difficult. Some can’t cross that bridge ever, and hopefully can be at peace with whatever size business they can manage to sustain by being a "genius with a thousand helpers."

When you prune a tree, you remove the dead or diseased parts so the whole tree will grow and thrive. If you don’t prune the tree, the whole tree is at risk of dying.

The same is true with businesses.

In the movie The Martian, Mark Watney, finding himself stranded 140 million miles from earth (and 4 years from rescue), sums up his situation like this:

"If the oxygenator breaks down, I'll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks down, I'll die of thirst. If the hab breaches, I'll just kind of implode. If none of those things happen, I'll eventually run out of food and starve to death. So, yeah. I'm &#$%!@.”

Chances are, you do many things well. As a business owner, this may have been imperative at times, especially in the early days when you had no choice but to do it all yourself.

Then at some point your business gained traction. The opportunities continued to grow, but so did the complexities of running the business.

Along the way, you may have become comfortable in certain roles such as being the ultimate decision maker, the go-to person for business processes, or just the person that seems to have all the right answers. Everyone wanted a piece of you!

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.