Should top managers focus on their peers or on those who they lead?
Many newly promoted managers stay focused on the work they used to do, but fail to give enough attention to the other parts of the business, with which they need to learn about and integrate with
(excerpt from a book I’m writing about startups)
Should a high level manager focus on their peers, or on those who they lead?
There is no right answer to this question, but here are some patterns that I've seen:
A new startup hires a talented software developer to create the software. The whole startup consists of just 4 people, including the CEO, the marketing person, the content person, and the software developer. Everything is going great, and soon the startup triples in size. Now the software developer is the team lead, with two software developers reporting to them. But still, it is more of a technical job than a management job, all three developers spend their time writing code. Then the startup triples in size again, and then again, so now the tech team has 27 people in it. That original developer is now given the title of Chief Technology Officer. The tech team breaks up into seven smaller teams: the frontend of the public site, the frontend of their internal dashboard, the business intelligence dashboards, the database, the devops, the iPhone team, the Android team. The CTO still thinks of their job as being mostly technical, so they want to closely monitor the developments on each team, so the leader of each team reports to the CTO and they have frequent meetings. The CTO might even occasionally checkout the actual code bases, run it on their personal machines, examine the quality of the code, perhaps write some code and submit a pull request. The engineers love having a leader who understands them so well.
This CTO is loved by the software developers but disliked by their peers. The CMO feels unheard, the CFO thinks the CTO doesn't show enough concern for the budget, the Chief Content Officer (CCO) feels that their team is crippled because the CTO doesn't understand their publishing needs. Such moments can undermine the career of a CTO. I'm aware of at least one case where, 10 years after the situation arose, the CMO and CFO and COO, who had all moved on to new jobs at new companies, were still whispering rumors about the CTO. When the CTO applied for a new job, and the company asked his former peers what they thought of him, they were told "He is uncooperative, he is not a team player." So clearly, in that case, it would have been better for the CTO if he'd spent less time with his tech team, and more time with his C-level peers. Or rather, there must have been some particular moment in the growing history of the company when it would have been best for the CTO to switch his focus away from tech and towards his peers, but the CTO missed that moment, much to the irritation of his peers.
Another pattern I've seen is the talented computer science student who does brilliantly in college and goes straight from undergrad to the Master's program. They start their career at age 24 and, because they have a Master's degree, they skip over the long years in the trenches working as a computer programmer. Instead, their first job is often high up in some medium sized company, or as CTO of a startup, or, as with Twitter and Zocdoc and Parsely, a startup that gets a ton of funding and so they are instantly the CTO of a medium sized, rapidly growing company. They find it natural to talk to their C-level peers, and to understand the needs of each team in the company, and to think strategically about what the company might need overall. Indeed, meeting with other C-level leaders, and talking in abstract terms about the future, resembles what they did in countless school exercises, so this activity is a comfortable one for them. But they are fairly incompetent at the basic task of understanding the worries of the software developers who work for them. Having never worked professionally as a software developer, they have no affinity for the work; they lack any understanding of its natural cadence. (This is not a fatal flaw, but such CTOs need to know their weaknesses and adjust to them by finding a good project manager, someone who does understand the cadence of tech work. The CTO then needs to defer to the time estimates generated by that project manager.)
You might be wondering if I've ever seen anyone get it exactly right, the perfect balance between focusing on the tech team versus focusing on the needs of the other teams in the company? My answer would be, "Yes, for a while." The situation is fluid and changes from month to month, so there is no perfect balance that lasts.
How does one decide where to invest one’s attention?
I understand tech best, so I write about it most, but this applies to all top level leaders: sometimes you need to focus on your own team, other times you need to focus on the needs of other teams, and what the leaders of those teams are trying to tell you. As the situation is ever-changing, one has to be endlessly adjusting. Again, leadership is an art, it will never be a science, it will never have the reliable repeatability that is the essence of the scientific method.
How is art different from science? What do they teach in art classes? They teach certain rough rules of thumb that can give good results if you practice them, especially if you are eventually able to internalize the rules and transform them into your personal code, such that they become a part of who you are. Books such as this one must operate in the same manner, offering advice but not scientific formulas that you can rote repeat.
Roughly speaking, a company can guide itself relative to two points of reference:
1. what is the company's greatest weakness?
2. what is the company's greatest opportunity?
Which of these is the most important? Again, it is a subtle question, there is no permanent correct answer.
Roughly speaking, if the tech stack is the company's greatest weakness, then the CTO needs to spend more time down in the trenches with the troops, and less time chatting with their C-level peers. Likewise, if marketing is the great weakness, or if inventory management is the greatest weakness, then the top level manager of those functions needs to focus on fixing the worst problems. If they are unable, then perhaps the CEO needs to fill their role with someone else.
But likewise, what is the greatest opportunity in front of the company? If the marketing team is doing very well, and the company is rapidly gaining market share, then the other C-level executives should be giving their maximum attention to the CMO, to make sure the needs of marketing are well taken care of. The CFO should meet often with the CMO, to be sure the CMO has the budget needed, within reason, to continue with their success. And likewise, in such a situation, the CTO should be cooperating closely with the CMO, to ensure the company's technology doesn't become the tripping point that ends the fantastic run.