How leadership growth maps to the six types of decisions
Each founder I work with sees a future in which he or she is no longer as essential to his or her company, and can earn some space from the day-to-day responsibilities. But given the complexity of the work involved in gaining that space, it can be hard to see where one is in the process. This week’s essay outlines a very practical framework I use to help leaders chart their progress up the metaphorical mountain, and intentionally push themselves to level-up faster.
How leadership growth maps to the six types of decisions
My practice is organized in part around helping people navigate the transition from founder to CEO — from the do-it-all hustler who can get an idea off the ground to the transcendent leader who can assemble and empower teams of teams to perform at their best in a VUCA world.
This transition changes people. The person who founds a company is virtually never the person who can take it the distance. Navigating this change requires a person to let go of the things that they do well as an individual contributor (often the very things that enabled them to build the company from scratch), and develop a comfort in leading others that, ideally, do those things even better. As Jobs said, a leader must stop playing an instrument, and start playing the symphony.
This transition is fraught with ego and identity challenges (example: who am I and why am I valuable if I’m not an engineer? Who am I to lead If I’m not as good as my team?), which can be disorienting, and the work is so internal and subjective that it can be tough to tell if you’re making progress.
The simplest way to orient yourself to this transition and chart your progress is to notice what types of decisions you tend to make versus those decisions you tend to delegate.
There are six types of decisions: why, where, who, what, how and when. When starting up a company, each of these decisions fall to the founder. To continue to lead a growing company, founders must delegate these decisions. This delegation process is often done in a specific order (when -> how -> who/what -> where -> why), which can serve as a point of orientation as you go.
Why
This decision is often an outgrowth of the founder’s personality and personal history, and is very rarely delegated outside of outright succession planning (and often not even then). This includes:
The mission of the company
Why you are doing what you are doing
Your transcendent purpose
Where
In growth stage companies this decision is often owned by the CEO and informed by the senior leaders. In earlier stage companies, this is often owned entirely by the CEO. This includes:
The vision of the company
Where are you going to be in 10 years?
Your BHAG; the most audacious impact your company can have.
What does success look like, and how will you know when you have it?
Who
In early stage companies, personnel decisions are critical and should be owned by the CEO. Many CEOs try to retain control of all these decisions as the company grows, but after 25-50 people if not sooner the CEO must begin to empower employees to make their own personnel decisions, starting with the most fungible roles and working upward (CEO always owns senior leadership). I’ve listed Who and What in descending order intentionally, because I most often see CEOs hold onto Who longer than they hold onto What, but sometimes these two are flipped. Who decisions include:
The personnel.
Which roles are needed to get the company where it needs to go
Who is hired or promoted into those roles, who is fired, put on PIPs, etc.
What
Like personnel decisions, outcomes are also owned by the CEO in early stage companies and delegated increasingly as the company grows, but most CEOs let go of defining the outcomes (while retaining some amount of veto-power) before letting go of personnel decisions. What decisions include:
Objectives & Key Results (OKRs)
Desired outcomes
Product
How
The strategy or plan. What specific actions will we take to accomplish the outcomes which get us to where we want to go? Strategy is often hard for first time founders to let go of, but holding on too long, or asserting themselves too much in these types of decisions can cause problems. There is little leverage in the CEO owning How decisions (and a hell of a lot to gain by giving employees ownership), so leaders at all stages would do well to err toward delegating here. Getting agreement around an objective, measurable outcome (What) is the key to doing so successfully. How decisions include:
Strategy
Action plans
Processes
When
Deadlines. By when will we accomplish our desired outcomes? This decision is often a negotiation between people at two different levels of an organization but is most effective when owned by the lower of the two levels; it’s easier to hold someone accountable to a deadline they gave themselves. Even CEOs of very young companies or very small teams will do well to give their teams responsibility for setting their own deadlines from the very beginning. When decisions include:
Deadlines
Using this framework
It’s probably important to note at this point that the above is a compass, not an instruction manual. There’s more to becoming a better leader than simply delegating decisions (and yes, there are many times in which delegation would be inappropriate). But as you go through the process of upgrading your leadership and the capabilities of your team, I find that the above framework can help you orient yourself to where you are in the process of extracting yourself from the center of your business, and to where you might go next.
As you reflect on your own growth as a leader, notice what decisions you’re holding onto. And then ask yourself what life might be like if you were to empower your team to handle the next rung up the ladder.
If it only scares you a little bit, it’s probably time.
Want to dive deeper?
If you liked this, check out this list of my top posts, read and shared by thousands of entrepreneurs.
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The secret to leadership (why authentic leadership is simply more effective)
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