The Messy Middle
My family is moving into a new house and we wanted to do a little bit of remodelling upstairs. Nothing big, just closing off a wall, making a closet a little bigger and swapping out a sink in the bathroom. My wife's family owns a construction business, so we are lucky to have an inside track with contractors and knowledge.
My father in law is a genius, he runs his own construction business but still made time to come and measure, sketch and draw up the plans himself. My wife and I his customers, and he our project manager, and architect. Truly spoiled. He called in the contractors, did the estimates, told everyone what to do and we are off to races. Until one morning, we realized that we forgot to move a switch and now we have a light upstairs that can only be controlled downstairs. This is annoying. The contractors had already drywalled, mudded and sanded, now they have to cut holes in the drywall, add a new plug, fill up the holes, mud them again and sand. This puts us behind a few days. Not the end of the world, but annoying. This is a detail that we absolutely could have caught beforehand, and worse, it should have been caught by the on site manager, the dry wallers, the carpenters and surely the electricians who did the work.
This morning, I am sipping my espresso and catching up with my father in law. I need to set the stage here as he is a titan of industry in the Canadian construction business. A 4th generation builder, who took a small bricklaying business and turned it into a large construction and development business that builds across North America and has survived and thrived through 3 real estate recessions. He is someone that I go to a lot for advice on building and growing a business. He is a good, honest man, and loves his team and does his best to treat everyone from the labourer to the VP of Construction with the same respect and care. I look up to him, because he has been in the arena and thrived there for many decades.
So, back to the conversation.
Father-in-law: "Man, I am so pissed that I missed that Kent. I am so sorry."
Me: "I am sorry, I was there and didn't catch it."
Father-in-law: "Not your job to catch it, it was my job. I made the plans."
Me: "Ya, but aren't you a little upset that one of the 5 smart and well paid people who were actually working on the project didn't catch it either? Like shouldn't they have caught it?"
Father-in-law: "No, actually. It's not their fault. It's not the project managers fault either, it's my fault. I built the plan, I told everyone what to do, I told them we needed it done fast so you and your family could get it before Christmas... it's my fault. What I could have done and should have done is just asked the project manager to build a plan, review it with the electrician and then I could have given my 2cents and then it would have been done better, but I took shortcuts and now, I only have myself to blame".
Damn. Hits hard when you are having the same problems at your onchain governance software company.
Startups are founder driven and typically one of the inflection points at a startup is when the founders start to hire other people to do jobs that they were doing. It’s the messy middle. Founders know that they need to bring on amazing people to scale the business and take care of details and day to day better than they can, because as parts of the business start to grow, other parts need more attention and so the cycle repeats until, if you are lucky and rain or shine show up each day to press that luck button you build a successful company that will outlive you and your co-founders.
So my challenge to you, and to myself is to look at the things going "wrong" in your company. Look at the bugs and the features that aren’t complete or have rough edges or just aren’t working and 9 times of out of 10 the problem lies with you, the founder. You have either half delegated a task, are still holding onto too many tasks or worse, you have delegated it in name only but are still sticking your nose in to make sure that it’s going the exact way you think it should go. All of these are common failure patterns and a recipe for an unmotivated team, that let’s be honest, is waiting for you to pop in and say: “The light switch should go there not there!”
What can you do?
Delegate it and walk away and send veiled threats if they do it wrong? No, this is delegation by abdication.
Delegate but watch really closely? That’s closer to the truth but it’s still not quite there.
Delegate and let your team design, and yes, make mistakes: Bingo.
Empower your team to own the problem, own the design, own the outcome, and yes, make some mistakes.
Those electricians, those dry wallers, those painters and project managers if you hold them accountable to design it in such a way that it won’t break, if you then hold them accountable to a high bar and outcome you want… they might still fail. That’s part of life, part of learning and part of building an anti-fragile team. As long as you aren’t making the same mistakes twice, you are learning and you are growing and you will win, whatever winning means for you and your team. If your team is making the same mistakes over and over then there might be a different problem, we can cover that one later.
Make a list of the things that aren’t working. If you are in the middle of it, and you likely are. Identify it, and get out of it.
You aren’t the smartest person, you aren’t the best at everything. You have a vision, you have an unhealthy sense of drive and purpose that this crazy idea, this idea that one day the government of Singapore will be voting onchain, and that one day IPO’s will happen on your software, that you will bring about transparency and accountability to company and government spending that you and your amazing team will usher in the future of collective creation… your job is to make sure that you are pushing closer to that. Your team, is better, more capable and can tell you what needs to get done, as long as you remain diligent on the vision and bar.
Unless...
Unless it's game point
If your team is down by 2, and you have 6 seconds on the clock and the coach calls a time out... who are they giving the ball to? They are giving the ball to the person that wants to win the most.
In a startup, that's typically a founder. For a long time that's the founder.
Your job, as a founder is to know and identify which problems are game point problems and which are not. The ones that are not, are always best left to the team to handle and execute. If it's a game point... hopefully you have built up a strong enough bench that it isn't you taking the shot but depending on your size and maturity, it's OK if that's you for a while.
Just know, that each time you take the shot, you are robbing the victory and the sour taste of defeat from a super talented person that you hired.
The messy middle is messy. For you and for your team. Push through, nothing is ever as good or as bad as it seems. There is more work tomorrow. Enjoy tonight.
