Are We Clear?
Growth is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is obvious, the curse less so.
What was very clear early on with just a handful of folks in the company becomes increasingly less so as the headcount grows. At the same time, growing a business successfully depends on making as many good decisions as possible, as quickly as possible.
As the company grows, if we don’t give up control at the top, we sacrifice our ability to make decisions in two crucial ways:
- In quality, because decisions are made further and further away from where the actual work happens.
- In speed, because the work will get increasingly blocked by decisions happening elsewhere.
With this in mind, few leadership responsibilities (at all levels) are more important than creating clarity. Only by creating clarity are we able to give up control and expect consistently reasonable decisions up and down the line. Unfortunately, leaders tend to significantly overestimate how much clarity their teams have.
To make things even more difficult, as circumstances change over time, clarity becomes a moving target. As Justin Rosenstein, co-founder of Asana puts it,
It would be wonderful if clarity were the default state of teams. Unfortunately, telepathy doesn’t exist yet, so instead the default state of teams is…
