I had a CEO like that once. He was very good at giving them impression that he could do the job of anyone in the company better than that person and the only reason anyone else was hired was cause he couldn't be in 200 places at once.
Could he not do other people's jobs, not do them as well?
If he was correct in his assessment, was the issue that it affected morale?
Right now, I feel I could do maybe 15 peoples jobs. Not as well, certainly unless I were full time, and so I cede control to them as long as they can explain their decisions.
But often I feel like that statement, even if true, bodes poorly for the company. Is that because of how employees respond to that attitude?
> Right now, I feel I could do maybe 15 peoples jobs.
I don't know you, so I'm not sure, but in my experience you are wrong. I understand where you came from, being a co-founder myself I know at the beginning you have to do the jobs of 15 or more people so you still believe you are as good as them.
But there are two problems:
- You should hire someone that is better than you. Even if you are the best in your field, you should hire someone that could possibly replace you.
- In almost every non menial job, you need to keep your skills updated. You cannot keep up with 15 different jobs and still run a company with 15 people. So after few months you are no more as good as them.
Be aware, you should understand the job of the people you manage. It is ok to ask them why they made some choice, it is ok to challenge them in a respectful way. But they probably know better. It is not just a morale problem, it is a specific problem.
When you become a manager, your task is no more doing their jobs. Your task is to help them become better at doing their jobs. (The next step is to become a leader, where you simply inspire). I saw a lot of managers at different levels (startup CEOs, mid-level manager) failing because they believe they are better at their jobs than their employees.
He certainly couldn't do many of the technical guy's jobs as well as they could. Even if he'd run the whole thing by himself 5 years earlier he had not kept up with the new systems when everything had grown by 10x.
Even for relatively simply things like helpdesk jobs he could just "make it so" since he was the CEO (eg just give customer a credit) rather than having to go though the normal procedures but his technical knowledge was still out-of-date there.
He wasn't the nicest person in general. The problem was that he assumed he could jump into any situation and was as expert as any other staff member. So he'd start telling the network guys what to do to solve something (and trying to login to the routers) despite having virtually no idea how the routing protocols used on the network worked.
The problem was he assumed that any employee only knew a subset of what he knew, so that employee's only value-add was saving him time, not any expertise.
Something like: "I know your job better than you do, now get out of my way so I fix the problem quickly and get back to important stuff that you don't understand"
> The problem was he assumed that any employee only knew a subset of what he knew, so that employee's only value-add was saving him time, not any expertise.
Wow, if I didn't know any better, I'd bet we worked at the same company! However, my guess is that the above attitude is commonly found among type-A founders. They would not have gotten to where they are without a healthy dose of arrogance.
> They would not have gotten to where they are without a healthy dose of arrogance.
I've seen this idea expressed on occasion. I don't think it's true. They need drive, they need confidence, they need decisiveness, they can certainly use a dash of charisma... but outright arrogance? No.
Arrogance is the refusal to consider even the possibility that one might be wrong. No dose of it is "healthy".
In small companies that are truly solving hard problems, having a CEO who could legitimately do everyone's job points to a hiring failure. In a less ambitious company, having a CEO who could legitimately do everyone's job probably means that the CEO is under-employed.
It is far more common for CEOs to think they can do everyone else's job than for that to actually be the case.
