High-achievers (and most people) are trained to simply put in more hours to get past problems. If I'm not doing well in a class, I study more or do extra credit work. If I'm not selling, I can make a hundred more calls. If I make a short-sighted technical decision, I can stay up all night and refactor my way out of it.
Part of the reason why management is so tough is that you can't always solve problems by simply working more. When it comes to team dynamics, a lot depends on catching problems in the moment and communicating clearly the first time. You can't just brute-force your way through problems like you can in most other areas. It takes intuition and understanding that is innate to a few folks and earned through experience by everybody else.
Think about this situation from the article: "We did, however, realize (a bit later than we should have) that disappearing from a tiny office too frequently during the day was a bad idea and hurt morale for the rest of the company." There was no way for them to fix this by working harder, they had to find an intuitive sense for how much time away from the office was too much.
Managing people is a fundamental skill for founders and one of the areas where intense effort often doesn't make a difference at all.
Having just gone through some co-founder struggles myself I think your response is right on the money. Especially when you talk about catching problems in the moment and communicating clearly the first time. I've learned that arguments can be on the surface about one thing (maybe a present issue) but really they stem from something previously uncleared or what SEEMED to be cleared arguments in the past. Each miss-communication compounds to affect the next. I'm just hopeful that experience and a willingness to learn and accept mistakes is the ultimate remedy.
"High-achievers (and most people) are trained to simply put in more hours to get past problems"
Hmmm, with personal experience, most people are not ever trained to do this. I'd say the majority are content to let things fester away, sometimes literally. Not that it is necessarily a bad thing, in most people's lives, things pass and they are the same, maybe a little poorer and wiser.
"...why management is so tough is that you can't always solve problems by simply working more."
Yes, you can work your way through management. In fact, I'd say thats the best kind of management: leadership. Look at good leadership role models: Drill Sergeants. They march every step of the way and set the bar for their recruits. Yes, there are MANY differences, but as far as a role model for managing, the military has a lot to look at, and from Major on down, they live and breathe the working management style.
"hey had to find an intuitive sense for how much time away from the office was too much"
Or, just talk to the folks and see what was up. Any time not spent in front of the people trading their time for your money is not good. They need to know why, almost reflexively, why the boss is out playing golf with clients and drinking at 2pm. It's not a matter of not working, its a matter of communication, which is work.
Not to say that you are not correct a lot of the time though. Management is a skill just as any other, and it takes a lot of mistakes and time to learn it. Though the MBA is reviled almost in the Valley, it does give an initial survey of how to deal with these issues, if used as it is intended.
This is also a reason why some high-achievers don't make good managers. When the game switches to things that don't involve hard work, they flounder. The more introspective high achievers make the switch.
> You can't just brute-force your way through problems like you can in most other areas. It takes intuition and understanding that is innate to a few folks and earned through experience by everybody else.
You absolutely can brute force with management. You can always pay people more, or give up some of your equity to someone who will work harder.
> "We did, however, realize (a bit later than we should have) that disappearing from a tiny office too frequently during the day was a bad idea and hurt morale for the rest of the company." There was no way for them to fix this by working harder.
Being present longer and taking fewer breaks is superficially working harder. More abstractly, you can work harder until you make redundant people who complain about coffee breaks, if you so choose.
> "You absolutely can brute force with management. You can always pay people more, or give up some of your equity to someone who will work harder."
That's not remotely 'brute forcing management'. That's just giving people different financial incentives. If you had a management problem before handing over cash/equity, you're still going to have one after.
>> You absolutely can brute force with management. You can always pay people more, or give up some of your equity to someone who will work harder.
Offering more money/equity will allow you to pick from a bigger pool of possible employees. If you know what you're doing, you can use that to hire better performing people. It's really hard to keep good people, though, because they can generally find another high-paying job when they get fed up with you.
I can think of three situations where a company can survive bad management:
-Companies that are growing ridiculously fast can keep great employees, at least as long as the growth keeps going. If everything else is going great, employees can overlook a manager who doesn't know what he's doing. That means everything is great--pay and benefits, opportunities for advancement, ability to have an impact, enjoyable coworkers, great location, etc. Happily for startups, this can give you breathing room to figure out how to be a good manager. The growth can't last forever, though. When it slows, the best performers tend to leave first since they're the most confident in their ability to find a similar position elsewhere.
-Companies that are the only game in town can keep great employees. This is sort of the inverse of the last one. If there are no other good opportunities, either because of geographic, economic, or political issues, employees will stay rather than being unemployed. If the economy gets better or the employee decides to move, the company is out of luck. Plus, the limited pool tends to work both ways--fewer good people look for jobs in these situations.
-Companies that can offer lottery-level payouts and craps-level odds. When I was in college in the mid-90's, Microsoft seemed to have their choice of any college grad in the western U.S. The reason was simple: there was a pretty good chance you could work there for three years and come out a millionaire. This obviously isn't a model that very many companies can follow, but lot of startups will try to make similar promises. (I'm not saying that Microsoft was poorly managed in the 90's, it's just an example.)
>> Being present longer and taking fewer breaks is superficially working harder. More abstractly, you can work harder until you make redundant people who complain about coffee breaks, if you so choose.
It appeared to me that they were heading off site to work out issues between founders, not because they were taking breaks. Whenever the bosses disappear together, I think smart employees will assume that something is up.
Part of the reason why management is so tough is that you can't always solve problems by simply working more. When it comes to team dynamics, a lot depends on catching problems in the moment and communicating clearly the first time. You can't just brute-force your way through problems like you can in most other areas. It takes intuition and understanding that is innate to a few folks and earned through experience by everybody else.
Think about this situation from the article: "We did, however, realize (a bit later than we should have) that disappearing from a tiny office too frequently during the day was a bad idea and hurt morale for the rest of the company." There was no way for them to fix this by working harder, they had to find an intuitive sense for how much time away from the office was too much.
Managing people is a fundamental skill for founders and one of the areas where intense effort often doesn't make a difference at all.