Founder mode and the boxes with no windows

Org charts suffer from the same flaw that ten year old family trees do. The boxes are all neat, the lines are all bold, but they don’t tell you who’s actually talking to whom at dinner time.

That was my line of thought this month as everyone was bickering over ‘founder mode’. The noisy interpretation is that founders are sick of professional managers and want to take full control again. Perhaps they do. But if I squint at the whine, it seems to be something more limited and more interesting. It seems to be the guy who opened the box in the org chart and he sees another box in it. Then another box inside that box (like Russian dolls) and he’s all “so why won’t you guys just tell me what’s inside of you?”

The scaling advice most of us grew up with says to look at each team as a module. Take a goal. Give it a status color. If you look into the module you’re micromanaging. I can see how this is tempting. You can dilute your attention span and not feel so bad about it. It also makes things easier for the manager. When the goal is pretty straightforward and not much is changing, it can work.

But usually it’s not so peaceful. The guy paying for the black box is often the engineer at the bottom of it. He’s making a hundred little choices every week. He’d make better ones if he knew what the customer really said on the call or why the date is the date. But what he gets is a ticket. A ticket is washed out context.

(I’m in the middle-ish management role of one of these org charts. I’ll say the black box has its own comforts. You green up and no one cares how. And you get to feel like the very best behaved module.)

So a founder who’s like “I really want to talk to engineers” makes me think “not threat so much as the pipes are stopped up. Okay.” Then it’s what happens after that makes me get nervous. So if the founder learns something and goes off and fixes the plumbing (e.g., some priority; some context is missing; there’s a manager sitting on information) that’s all cool. If the founder says go redesign it this way and a week later the manager finds out in a hallway they’ve lost the ability to manage the team a little bit. The engineer knows how to get around them. Not anyone’s intention, but it’s the simplest version.

There’s also a math thing: it’s maybe a few hundred people that a single person can stay plugged in to before it gets fuzzy. Beyond that founder mode is only going to work if a lot of other people learn how to do it; close to the action, share lots of context, and leave things alone sometimes. So is that still founder mode? Or is it that they did good management? I’m not sure. I think the name is more important to the people fighting than to those who it helps.

I think middle managers should kind of itch a little reading all this, including me. If there’s a person two layers above you that has to climb over you to learn your area. That’s the box you’re climbing over. I’ve sometimes written status updates to reassure and possibly have it be helpful. But it’s a different genre.

I keep imagining an org chart with windows in all the boxes. Awful on a slide. Perhaps better though.