The Part They Don’t Tell You About Startup Team Building
At Google, the director of my team repeated a management mantra to us quite often. “Manage yourself out of a job; make yourself redundant”, she would say. “Empower your people and then get out of the way.” Our director was a terrific team builder.
Before Google, she founded a startup where she learned to build a company. When she told us her mantra, she was sharing her learnings with us.
Company builders sow the seeds of a team, cultivate each teammate, promote a leader from within and then step away after the team has become capable of running itself. They are force multipliers. Where there was nothing, a self-sustaining organization has blossomed. It’s a beautiful thing.
But no one talks about what happens after that process is completed. Watching company-building first-hand at a few portfolio companies, I’ve listened to founders and managers explain the challenges of being in this situation.
Once a leader has managed himself out of a job, he has to be ready to find another. Being ready means a few things.
First, it means letting go, ceding pride of authorship and ownership. Someone else is running the team and making the decisions.
Second, it means asking two introspective questions and answering them honestly: “What does the business need next?” and “What am I uniquely capable of achieving for the business?”
Last, it means completely changing daily priorities and a work schedule to focus on the new task at hand, the one thing the business needs next that the person can uniquely provide.
It’s no small change. Often, the next problem is apparent and the transition is seamless, easy and logical. But sometimes, these transitions stress team builders enormously. Sometimes, they create crises of identity or confidence: I used to run this team; now what do I do? Sadly, sometimes it means finding work elsewhere.
Despite the stresses created after the process is completed, managing yourself out of a job is a fine way of summarizing an ethos of team building. But we have to be prepared for the sometimes difficult transition to the next project after we’ve made ourselves redundant.
Experienced enterprise and human capital development consultant. International trade entrepreneur. Trainer and coach.
10yI have worked with some managers that feel sufficiently threatened by the rising profiles of subordinates, threats are usually as a result of managers feeling their lives starts and ends with current job status. For me the article best explains the need for managers to continually reinvent self and have a self believe that they can move a step beyond their present!
Visionary Developer Relations Associate
10yI definitely struggle with this... As an extremely proud man and a person for whom perfection is always the goal, it can be hard to let go and see my 'baby' in someone else's arms. But it's a skill I need to develop... I often find myself reabsorbing responsibilities I should have left alone and placing too big a burden on my shoulders. Great read!
Chief Strategy Officer at Innovative Global Supply, LLC
10yI really appreciate those two questions: "What does the business need next" & "What am I uniquely capable of achieving for the business?" We might all be better off if we asked those questions of ourselves each morning. TY.
Trust-building for Boards and top teams, & adviser on leader-leader coaching pete@coachingpairs.com
10yForgive me for disagreeing in any way, but I can't quite share the same reaction as the others commenting. I think it depends on the potential of the business as well as the nature of your entrepreneurship. Let's be clear, some entrepreneurs get bored quickly, and this is a key part of why they need to make themselves dispensable. Others believing in growing their team in a way that makes it possible for the team to grow with with, and where they have huge potential and staying power as individuals so is there huge potential for the business and the top team. One way isn't better than the other, they're just different.