A few weeks ago everyone was arguing about “founder mode”, but before it came the idea of “Peace time CEO/War time CEO”.
The removal of the unnecessary violence in the metaphor is an improvement, but the content of peacetime/wartime is actually better. It’s more specific, and more about operating with focus and efficiency. Founder mode is more about individualistic exceptionalism.
It is an eternal mystery to me why some people still rate El*n M*sk. Thinking about this, I wonder if it’s that he willingly put himself on extra hard mode by taking a barely viable business and saddling it with a mountain of debt. It’s the leadership equivalent of padlocking yourself blindfolded in a tank of water. Now the world is divided into people who think his confidence means he knows what he’s doing and people who think he’s delusional.
In tech we have spent such a long period in zero interest rate driven growth that what it means to be an effective leader has been more about supporting growth than navigating difficulty. Perhaps it is in part because it’s hard to share the more difficult things. The day I had to lay off half my team remains one of the worst days of my career, but it’s not a story I will ever share publicly in a way other people could really learn from it.
Most people are heavily biased by their own experience, are inclined to credit skill rather than luck, brilliance rather than being in a position to be in the right place at the right time. It’s easy to tell a story about how you did the right things when the numbers were going up, and it’s hard to know what worked and what didn’t when the numbers are going down. You make difficult decisions, and you hope for the best, and you learn what you can. The more you move up the org chart, the fewer people who will have context on the decisions you make – and the more people who will be angry with you, regardless of what you do.
In good times, leaders were defined too much by their ability to sell a vision, which generated the valuation and helped them build a team. I think this whole founder mode idea is about an equally shallow definition of what it means to be a good leader in a bad time, all the shallower because it doesn’t admit that it is a bad time.
In hard times, I think leaders need to:
- Have rigour to decision making – constrained resources mean decisions are harder to reverse and more costly to get wrong.
- Be willing to make hard decisions and stand behind them – it’s inevitable that you have to make (more) hard decisions in a tough market.
- Be intensely focused on delivering value – in hard times leadership is measured less by vision and more what is actually accomplished.
- Build systems of accountability – and use them, when layoffs are more likely, it’s all the more critical that the team you have is structured to be successful.
- Understand constraints (of resourcing, time, or money) and how to operate within them – this feeds into decision making, and also the need to say no.
- Find cheaper and more sustainable ways to motivate and align people – when you can’t promote people or pay them more, what else can you offer them?
Reflecting on this list, I dispute that the skills required for hard times are not needed in good times. Perhaps other skills carry more weight, perhaps it’s easy to get away without them. Perhaps they are the things we cut corners on when we’re busy. I know I could be better at all of these things, and I can think of many times when I haven’t done them more than sufficiently.
Whilst I’m all for pushback on shallow VC think pieces, I think we have to be honest about how the market has shifted, and how we as leaders can be effective within it. For me, that starts with being realistic about the current reality, my own place within it, how expectations have shifted, the skills needed to be effective – and how to reconcile them with my personal value system.