Why good leaders don't have much work to do

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

(Mitchell Harper), Co-Founder of Bigcommerce and Founder of PeopleSpark, explains how Bigcommerce grew from five people to five hundred and how his job as an executive changed.

One of our investors once told us: "As soon as you assemble the management team, you have so much time that you will not know where to spend it!" It was 2012 and we just got a $ 20 million investment in a Series B round. “Yeah, of course! Right now we have no time for anything other than work, and no change is expected,”CFO Eddie and I thought.

At that time, our management team consisted of three people: me, Eddie and Rob - the executive director. We were a force to be reckoned with, but there were only three of us. From 2012 to 2014, we worked hard to put together a big and cool team for Bigcommerce. We have decided on the positions for which we want to find people in the first place: developers, technical support. Then we needed product managers, sales managers, marketers, business development, communications and, finally, corporate development specialists.

We worked with recruiting agencies, attracted our acquaintances, in particular investors, were actively involved in the company's PR, raised the level of corporate culture and began to often win competitions as the “best place to work”. The buzz we made certainly helped, considering that a couple of years ago the company only employed 12 people in a small office in Sydney. Our assertive campaign in 2014 had a wow effect.

Over the course of two years, from 2012 to 2014, we put together a great leadership team with amazingly talented people from Google, Salesforce, PayPal, and Twitter. There were several failures, but when employees got involved and started implementing their strategies, we felt that we could trust them to make important decisions.

Great leaders are "editors", not "writers." And if you have to “write” more often than “edit”, then you have hired the wrong people.

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Your job as a leader is to “edit”. If you sometimes "write" something - it's okay, but if it becomes a tradition, you have serious problems with the team. Each time you solve a work problem, ask yourself whether you are "writing" or "editing" now, and try to always switch to the "editor" mode. You don't have to come up with solutions and strategies, but your people.

When we started handing over authority to our new leaders, my investor said that we would free ourselves up a lot of time when we found a good team. And he was right! Growing a company and hiring people smarter than you is scary, but it brings freedom. You start to spend less time in business and work more for business: there is time to think over the global development strategy of the company, to look for key partners.

I'm still very busy, but in a completely different way. When I left Bigcommerce early last year to take on a new PeopleSpark project, I spent some time thinking about six years at Bigcommerce. Finally, I realized what the investor meant when he said that I would not be so busy.

Good leaders are in business for the first few years. During these years, they play several roles at once: in the morning they answer calls to technical support, and in the evening they conduct an interview for the position of marketing director. I was back in that cycle when I opened PeopleSpark, which is wonderful, but this almost hourly switch from one role to another is fundamentally different from running a 500-person company.

When you start growing from a small company to a large one, your main task is to surround yourself with incredible leaders who can do the job in their places much better than you have ever done. And you will increasingly nod, agreeing with their decisions, you will begin to trust the team, and you will think to yourself: “Well, wow! We have put together this team! " You will delegate more, ask fewer questions, and be able to see the big picture of your business. This is what it means "You will be busy less." But you will always have a lot of business to do. After all, that's what you and the leader.