founder, management, structureWe are a small startup of 5 founders and 14 employees.
Since we are a lot of founders, each founder has to balance between two roles - decision making (high level) and actual work (low level day to day work).
Sometime balancing between the two on the personal level is hard. Also, the decision making process between 5 equal founders is not trivial.
We’ve defined the fields of responsibility each one has and we’ve become pretty good at staying out of each other stuff when it’s not necessary.
Still, I feel like the traditional hierarchy system is not fit for this type of company (at least until it grows up) and there must be a better way to manage the company. Especially in the field of setting a vector for the company and making a decision that sticks and doesn’t get reverted after a while.
I’ve looked up some other systems like holacracy and flat-organizations.
What decision making processes do you know of that can be a good fit ?
Thanks
We’ve this saying in France, which more or less translates to:
You cannot navigate a ship in an iceberg field using committee-driven decision making.
The same is very true in an organization IMO: some amount of hierarchy, however minuscule, is needed irrespective of wishful thinking.
As such, do things in a committee as much as is reasonable, and play as a team to discuss, negotiate, and schedule doing the right things internally.
But in the end, it must be clear where the responsibilities of each founder begins and ends (their turfs, if you will): if they own it, then it’s implicit that they can basically call the shots. And in the hopefully rare moments when it’s needed, the CEO’s arbitration is final.
If you fail to do so, you’ll waste a lot of time on trying to decide what to do, instead of using that precious time to execute.
It sounds like you have too many people involved in the decision making process. Trying to gain consensus from 5 co-CEOs can be daunting, especially if every decision is sent to this leadership committee. The holacracy and other flat styled organizational structures were a noble experiment, but the outcome has not been all that promising. You have to ask yourself what is the main purpose of your organization? If it to conduct a social experiment on leading edge organization structures, by all means go for something like that. Otherwise, you have to consider why virtually all organizations have a hierarchy of sorts.
You really need someone, an individual, that is the overall leader of your organization. This is important enough that even the SCRUM framework specifies having a single product owner; someone that has the final authority on what the product should be. There will be times when your team of 5 don’t agree on something, something major. Not taking action, or delaying action to gain consensus could be disastrous. Timeliness of decisions is important and should be considered when deciding how your team should go about making decisions.
Good luck!
Besides the recomendation of Denis of having separate roles and responsabilities: voting everything is often too slow, so it is better to separate responsabilities, every week each member will say what are their objectives for the next week. At the end of the week, members will say what they accomplish (and not).
However, if you feel more confortable following a structured system, try Scrum. Scrum originally was formalized for software development projects, but it works well for any complex, innovative scope of work. It tells you have how to organice the meetings, how long and how often they should occur, etc.
Do not underestimate the value of infighting. At my current job I work together with someone who is on the same hierarchy level as me. Consequently none of us can tell anyone what to do. The only way for me to make him do something is to convince him. Being right helps a lot in convincing people, so the person who is right tends to get to say what gets done. If I had the authority to just tell him what to do I would have done so and the result would have been worse. This only works if you have the same goals, similar and significant expertise and the same understanding of what is “better”.
In your case with 5 people it is a bit more difficult. Still I would advice to stick with convincing and not to speed up the process by voting or defining fields of responsibility. If you do not want to go through that annoying process make your employees do it (at least 2 people who have to agree, with enough expertise and all necessary information to create a good strategy). When they fight and come to you resist the urge to take someone’s side. Also respect their decision once they agree, otherwise you do not get the benefit. Once you have a boss telling people what to do he/she/it makes worse decisions, because a boss doesn’t see as well what is happening, because the employee will try less hard to make it work and because a boss tends to make “safe” decisions that are good for rejecting blame on failure but bad to run a company.
Once all 5 founders agree the decision will probably be good and since you all have a lot of pressure you should not get stuck in inaction.
All content is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.