Andy Ellis: How to Lead Without Becoming the Hero, the Villain, or the Bottleneck

About this episode

In this episode of Run the Numbers, CJ sits down with leadership coach and former Akamai executive Andy Ellis. They break down why being indispensable can actually hurt your career, why managers shouldn’t automatically replace someone who leaves, how hero-villain thinking leads to bad decisions, and what great delegation and leadership actually look like. — SPONSORS: Rillet is an AI-native ERP built for modern finance teams that want to replace NetSuite and close faster. With revenue recognition, close management, multi-entity support, and native Stripe and Salesforce integrations, Rillet helps scaling companies run their finance stack in one place. Hundreds of teams, including Windsurf and Mercor, use Rillet to make the zero-day close real. Book a demo at https://www.rillet.com/cj Maximor is an autonomous finance platform that runs order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, the close, cash management, and reporting on self-learning agents instead of a dozen disconnected tools. One PE-backed customer posts 98% of transactions directly to its ERP, with the remaining 2% routed to a human for review. You pay for outcomes, not seats. See it at https://www.maximor.ai/ Brex is an intelligent fi