One of the trickiest things about being a startup CEO that’s scaling from zero to one, and then from one to a billion, is recognizing that your job changes over time just like the jobs of all of your employees, and you too need to keep pace with those changes.
In the early days, you’re either by yourself or leading a small team that you can count on one hand. Your direct output is material and moves the needle considerably for the company each and every day — whether you’re doing fundraising calls, working towards your MVP, or winning your first customers. You immediately see the results of your efforts and it feels really good.
As your business starts to come together, you add employees to do jobs you don’t like, or jobs that others will be better at than you, and you’re suddenly a team of fifty. You’re still hustling, shifting from one urgent task to the next, but you’re finding yourself increasingly stretched — fundraising, hiring, big sales meetings, product roadmapping — nothing is going as fast as you want and you’re longing for the early days when you just got sh*t done!
This will inevitably happen, and lead to continued slow downs and stagnation across your organization unless you recognize that your job has changed and you take action.
Said differently, as the CEO of a three-person company, what you do everyday is literally 33% of the output. At 50 employees, it’s just 2% of the output. Obviously we’re not saying your job is diminished or less important as time goes on — but your role and responsibilities need to shift significantly to impact the work of the other 49 people on your team.
One of our favorite reads on this concept is Talentism’s 4D Model, which we’ve excerpted below but encourage you to click through and read in full for more context.
- Do: You do the work to accomplish the goals. The limit to growth is your time: one person can only do so much in a day.
- Decide: You decide who does what. The limit to growth is your attention: there is a cap on how many projects one person can delegate, and a limit on how many people an individual can effectively delegate to.
- Design: You design the roles, structures and processes that accomplish goals. The limit to growth is an individual’s ability to deal with systematic complexity. For example, someone may excel at designing processes, but struggle to share the updated process and expectations with relevant stakeholders.
- Decode: You decode where the market is going and bring those insights to your team. There is no limit to growth.
While not completely linear, this complexity typically balloons as organizations grow. As is true for so much of our work, the challenge of these transitions is rooted in the context.
We frequently see leaders who are great at seeing the future (Decode), and have impressive capacity for getting things done (Do). Yet often they aren’t inclined to Design or Decide, either because those stages require an operational rigor and expertise that super Decoders and Doers don’t possess, or because they haven’t had the opportunity and necessity to practice. The result is that as companies grow and become more complex, those leaders create misdirection, confused priorities, and decreased productivity.
As you scale, think of the CEO as a fireman — if you do your job perfectly, you’ll wake up everyday and have nothing to do operationally. That is to say, if you’ve mastered the 4D model and execute it to a tee, then you’ll have plenty of time to focus on the real opportunities to drive your business towards a bazillion dollar outcome. (This of course is an oversimplified view, as we don’t think it ever actually happens with a permanence/finality — you’ll always be floating in and out of some firefights — but its a great north star to align your role towards as you scale and will pay dividends in elevating your team’s output and performance.
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