Micromanage more: Why founders should stay in the details
If you’re like most people, you’ve probably been taught to delegate, trust your team, and avoid micromanagement at all costs. That’s all good in a normal company. But what if that advice is dead wrong for startups?
As I work with more startups, I see that what people need is more involvement from the founders. Not less. Startups need to move at an unnatural pace. They work towards a vision of a different future without losing too much quality. All before they run out of money.
As a founder, your main job is to keep reminding people of this. The best way to do this is to be deeply involved with the details. Let’s break it down.
Set the bar
If you know your startup lore, you might have heard this quote from Steve Jobs:
”The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organisation and keep it at bay.”
Sounds great, right? But here is the thing. While Steve Jobs was known as a visionary leader he never stopped obsessing over the details. He’d often skip levels of management to work directly with designers and engineers.
One such example comes from the early Lisa days. Early engineer Bill Atkinson presented a UI with ovals, but Jobs wasn’t satisfied. Jobs wanted rectangles with rounded corners instead of ovals. Atkinson pushed back, saying it was too difficult.
Jobs then famously forced Bill Atkinson to take a walk. He pointed out that rounded corners were everywhere. Even parking signs had rounded corners! So, it shouldn’t be that hard to do in the UI. Bill then gave in. Jobs got the now-iconic, rounded-corner rectangles in all Apple UIs.
When I read about great founders and startups, obsessing over details is something that comes back over and over again. This is because nobody will ever care about the startup as much as the founder does. So the founder needs to set the bar for what is acceptable. In other words, the founder has to involve themselves in the details.
Set the pace
Startups need to move at an unnatural pace. They have to, because they are, by default, dead. Their limited funds mean they have a deadline. They must either hit a milestone to raise more money or break even.
If you hire someone from a company that is default alive (as in, makes a profit), they will not think in this way. They will try to build the optimal solution rather than the bare minimum. They will delegate and allow for mistakes to be learning opportunities.
That doesn’t work for startups. Every mistake means you have that much less time before it’s game over. So your job as a founder is to ask “how can we do this faster?”.
People will push back and give you a whole lot of reasons for why it’s a bad idea to do it faster or how it can’t be done faster. But do you know how long it took Bill Atkinson to implement the really difficult rounded corner rectangles? One day. Maybe it wasn’t so difficult after all?
When pushed, talented people can often achieve much more, much faster than they initially thought. This is because creativity needs constraints. As a founder it’s your job to bring a sense of urgency to create these constraints.
Share the vision
As a founder, you are the only one who has the full picture. I don’t care about how many times you think you have communicated a vision and a plan. For at least the first couple of years the only complete version of it will be the one in your head.
That’s because your idea of what the startup is changes slightly every day. This is good. Change means you are learning. It also means that you need to find a way to share your learnings without having to call an all hands meeting every single day.
The fastest way to do that is to work on the details with other people. Every interaction is an opportunity to talk about your latest idea of what you are building together. How the rounded corner rectangles connect to the larger picture.
This is not to say that you shouldn’t do all-hands. Those are good too. But the nuance comes from doing the work and correcting missteps in real time.
The art of stepping back
As you share your vision through hands-on involvement, you’ll start to notice a shift. Some team members will start to adopt your way of thinking, your standards, and your sense of urgency.
They’ll start to anticipate your decisions and make choices that align with your vision. This is the beginning of scaling yourself and your impact. It’s also the point where you need to start thinking about stepping back from some of the details.
Until then, though, don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty. Remember that your startup wants your attention to detail, your sense of urgency, your clear vision.
What others might call micromanagement, we simply call building a startup.
