Paul Graham's essay on Founder Mode made the rounds around tech Twitter and other places this week. The thesis, in short, is that there are two distinct ways to run a company: "founder mode" and "manager mode." The latter — which says, broadly, hire good people and give them room to do their jobs" is the conventional method taught in business schools, but it often fails for founders. Founder mode, still largely undefined, involves more direct engagement and breaks traditional management principles. The founder should dig into all of the important stuff and, in a sense, micromanage it.

There are a ton of opinions flying around about this, which is somewhat surprising given how short and vaguely the concept is described. After reading it, two thoughts came to mind:

1/ Leaders are measured on the output of their organization. There are multiple ways to achieve an outcome based on the leader's skills, talents, organizational structure, markets, competitors, environment, etc. Concluding that one style is better than another in all cases, or even most cases, seems like a mistake.

2/ Personally, I've found that one of my greatest skills is recruiting, engaging, and retaining incredibly driven and talented leaders. I spend an enormous amount of time and energy on doing so. The result for me has typically been to have teams that don't need to be micromanaged and can produce results at extremely high levels while feeling empowered, engaged, independent, and supported to do great things. If I didn't have this skill — or I didn't focus on improving it — I might be more inclined to micromanage as that would be the thing that would drive results.

I wrote about my approach to this in my User Guide six years ago, most of which remains true today. Relevant excerpt:

“Micro-management vs. Hands-off:

I definitely fall on the hands-off side of this spectrum. My high-level theory is that I try to hire superheroes that are going to figure out what needs to get done and will go get it done. When we aren’t hitting goals I will seek more information and transparency. There’s a see-saw dynamic here: good results means I need less information and transparency, poor results means I need more information and transparency. Understand this and manage to it. Get ahead of my concerns.

I don’t like micro-management and I don’t need all the detail. I’ll generally let you decide how much detail I need. I prefer that you consider me your thought partner and you should provide me with enough detail to do that. I don’t want to measure your inputs but I want to understand them.

Frameworks are very important to me. I’ll often be less interested in the decision you made and more interested in the framework you used to make the decision.”

As leaders, we need to leverage our strengths, minimize our weaknesses, and operate in a way that's going to produce results. There are probably a thousand different styles and equally as many ways to brand those styles. The fact is, most of us pick from them as needed. The real skill isn't in choosing a management style and sticking to it; it's using the style and management tools that work for us in the right place at the right time to produce the most optimal outcomes.