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I have two answers. The first is rather snarky and the second is rather idealistic. My experience indicates the first is more accurate, but I'm a sample of one (and not a particularly successful sample of one to boot). 1.) By nature, startups are chaotic and if you try to remove all chaos, there is a very good chance that you will handcuff people to such a point that they can't handle chaos. To accomplish this, I like to select early employees based on an aptitude or interest in chaos. I look for evidence that my early employees are self motivated and capable of both making decisions with imperfect information and learning new things quickly. In my role, I like to make sure that I write down as many of my decisions possible and the criteria that I used to arrive at those decisions. And, in a leadership role, I like to remind my team that things will be chaotic and that I'll document my decisions to show them general principles, but if things are chaotic and you don't know what to do, use your best judgment, use my principles and our mission to inform that best judgment and know that I'll support you. 2.) In startups, you have to learn how to separate useful chaos from company killing chaos. It's useful chaos if you release an early version and receive feedback from a majority of your users stating they'd happily pay $xxx a month if you had features a, b and c. It's company killing chaos if a senior engineer has to talk to fifteen people to get permission to spend $15 on a build tool that will save her five hours a week forever (I'm not exaggerating much). The way around this one seems to be relentless delegation, which requires the same sorts of selection as in my snarkier answer. This path is also very complicated for first time founders who don't quite know what they don't know. It is very complicated to delegate something away, realize that it's a valuable task for you to perform and then try to take it back... |
I think you're smart to look for employees who are happy with a bit more chaos than usual. I think it's Simon Wardley that characterises such people as "pioneers" as opposed to "settlers" or "town planners".
I also really like the attitude of "use your judgement and I will support your decision", it's so valuable and often rare that people do this. Too many people are control freaks and believe only they can/should make the decisions, however small. Even worse when you let people make decisions and then undermine them!
Interested to know how you record and share your decisions - sounds like a really good practice.