The successful seed-stage founders that I see get there through relentless obsession. They’ve memorized every key customer’s phone number, they can recite the company’s run rate and monthly sales down to the penny, and they remember the beer preferences of every employee when they buy a celebratory round at the pub. Precision and exactitude are what got them from dream to product-market fit, which is why they’re so surprised when I tell them their next addition to the executive flock needs to be not a detail wonk like they are, but a macro-manager. They’re the rarest of birds, but just what your team needs when it’s time to scale up.
Plumage
You know micro-managers from stage and screen: Jonah Jameson screaming at Peter Parker to get exactly the right shot of Spider-Man, or Bill Lumbergh issuing thinly-veiled threats over using the wrong TPS cover sheet in Office Space. They’re involved in all decisions, at any level, and personally specify details from the color of an icon to the name of a database table. Their organizations often look like armies of Mini-Mes, reflecting the boss’s tastes and choices all the way down.
By contrast, the macro-manager puts the laissez in laissez-faire, painting a broad strategy, while staying completely out of execution. The macro-managing CTO tells their team nothing but “make onboarding self-serve;” the macro-focused Head of Customer Service says, “get call times down.” Their drive-by direction confuses their teams at first, and their tendency to disappear means there are precious few opportunities to clarify details and validate decisions. That is, of course, exactly the point of a macro-manager.
Evolutionary Advantages
Two things your team hasn’t needed much up to now are inconsistent strategies and total failures. Surviving the perilous process of discovering a business model meant you needed everyone to agree and commit, not hare off in an independent direction. Since choosing the wrong pricing model or hiring a too-junior data scientist could have been a fatal error, you made sure to rapidly block any such disasters before they got started.
But the macro-manager is painfully aware that scaling up is going to require a lot more autonomy from everyone, which in turn results in wasted effort and failed initiatives. The trick, they know, is to mitigate these downsides while maximising the learning and leadership growth– today’s missed weekly sales target teaches us the lessons that let us blow past the quarterly target. In the immortal words of Ronald Reagan, they adopt “trust, but verify,” and run many small, low-risk experiments: a single blog post with new messaging, a tweak to the onboarding flow for 10% of users, a new shipping partner for the northeast only. And though it often looks like they’re sitting on her hands, they’re actually watching closely and testing their nascent leaders and teams, pruning the failures and rewarding the successes. The misfires are contained, and the organization learns. They’re turning your scale-up cash into a stronger team and a repeatable, turn-key operation.
Care and Feeding
So, what do you do when you find, capture, and install your macro-manager?
First, don’t kill the goose. When your macro-manager says, “I don’t know,” in response to a detailed question, don’t go ballistic. “Trust, but verify” yourself, and let the manager find out from the newly autonomous organization what’s happening. Slightly slower lines of communication are normal at this stage. Though you shouldn’t let the team get totally lost, a little more “fog of war” is exactly what you need to allow execs—and you—to act strategically.
Second, help the macro-manager and the team define a narrative for steering toward their goals. Like Pixar, use the enthralling format “Once upon a time, ____. Every day, ______. One day, _____. Because of that, _____. Because of that, ____. Finally, ____.” Here’s a real-life example from one of my clients:
“Today, customers wait 10 days for their month-end reports. Every month, three people work full-time to produce them in Excel. Now, we’re replacing the spreadsheets with a reporting engine. Because of that, we’re taking a lot of the reporting team’s time. And because of that, quarterly reporting will be slower. But in the end, we’ll save $100K annually and slash error rates.” A clear narrative like this gives them a hook to hang updates on and a solid reason to request changes or new resources. Moreover, it keeps both you and the macro-manager out of unnecessary detail and focussed on strategy.
Finally, don’t let them off the hook. An effective macro-manager will know how to give you a frequent and helpful account of progress, just as they’re teaching the team to do. Someone newer to this management style may need your help to set up weekly demos or a fortnightly progress review with enough detail to let you see where they are on the narrative path. The danger to watch out for is the macro-manager who blandly asserts everything is fine, that the engineers are hitting their “sprint goals” or that “sales training is going fine,” without any detail or accountability. That usually lasts right up until the team crashes off the cliff with a massive and surprising miss.
Enjoy the Flight
Working with a macro-manager can be a real shock to you, their peers, and the whole team. More than once, you’ll think you’ve made a terrible mistake and that the hands-off approach is masking incompetence. However, if you’re persistent, pursue a clear narrative, and verify that there’s real progress and learning happening, you’ll be rewarded with a successful, autonomous team—and maybe you’ll be able to relax and macro a bit yourself!
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