Is It Important For Founders To Be Good Managers?
As Founders, we become CEOs the day we incorporate our companies. But are we good at management? Can we consider ourselves great managers or should we just go with the flow and see what the future holds for us?
One thing is for sure — someone will need to make decisions that get results for our businesses. Whether to assume that role or bring someone in to assume it is a decision we must make early on.
Faking it until we make it
This may sound like an overused English aphorism, but for Founders who find themselves acting as the first CEOs of their newly-incorporated companies, it couldn’t be more relevant and accurate.
Chances are, we may not afford the luxury of hiring bona fide managers when we’ve just started a business. Also, it’s most likely that we only have a small team that doesn’t require a lot of management to produce the desired results.
In the early stages of our businesses, we can get by without being top managers.
Good managers are better leaders
Anyone can become a manager. As Founders, we often find ourselves filling this job opening by default rather than by design. Yet, we may not even be good at managing ourselves!
Becoming a manager involves being in charge of a team of individuals with different personalities, competencies, and potentially different backgrounds. As managers, we’ll be responsible for rallying everyone to get behind our companies’ goals.
To achieve this successfully, we’ll need to become great leaders — leaders that subordinates can look up to and want to follow every step of the way.
Smart Founders surround themselves with strong leaders
While there’s absolutely nothing wrong with learning the ropes by trial and error, it’s a good idea to associate ourselves with successful leaders along the way. These people may not necessarily hold leadership positions in our organisations, but they somehow always find a way to bring others along in their pursuit of company goals.
Surrounding ourselves with people that have business and leadership acumen is a great way to learn and hone leadership skills.
Great Founders know when to delegate managerial responsibilities
Good managers have the right blend of experience and natural managerial tendencies that make them effective leaders. If it’s apparent that we lack both, then the best course of action is to bring in someone that matches that job description.
Delegating managerial responsibilities to someone else is a sign of strength — not weakness. It shows that we’re willing to admit that management isn’t our forte so we can let someone who has the necessary skills take charge.
We can always lend out input into the areas of business where we’re the strongest.
Successful leaders prioritize service to humanity
As leaders in our organisations, we must rally teams behind a common goal towards improving the lives of the people we serve. As Sir Richard Branson said:
“There is no greater thing you can do with your life and your work than follow your passions — in a way that serves the world and you.”
Service to humanity, and making ourselves better by helping others is an important guiding principle of management philosophy, especially in these times.
Laurent has spent the best part of 20 years working with European, US, and Israeli startups across a range of sectors, helping them scale and reach stable repeatable growth. He has been fortunate to see two startups IPO, one acquisition, a couple of pivots, a few get to hypergrowth… and also one or two who didn’t make it… You can find him at Scaling Partners, on LinkedIn, and on Twitter.
