Founders

In defense of micromanagement

Delegation is over-rated, micro-management is under-rated and misunderstood.

 Zuck talks about this
“probably one of my most controversial leadership or management things is I don’t actually believe in delegating that much. I kinda think like the way a founder should work is you should basically make as many decisions and get involved as in as many things as you can”


Every great founder in my experience  does the above - see Elon or Jensen Huang. 

They are in the details – every technical nuance, every financial model’s implications, every pixel. I rarely see a great company run in any other way.


The natural question that gets asked is: doesn’t this make every leader below them unhappy? I’ll answer this empirically: look at the core leadership team of any of these companies and you’ll see they have the same set of people for many, many years

Delegating is not abdicating it means you are still in control but you trust your team to bring their A+game. Micro managing on the other hand is having your cloud hovering around every tiny decision . 

The late Steve jobs  summed it up beautifully. " We don't hire smart people to tell them what to do. We hire them so that they can tell us what to do".