How many of us have made that key hire that we have been waiting to find for so long and have made the mistake of thinking that we have found the last piece to the puzzle? Sometimes we assemble a team one member at a time in the belief we are building something solid. We then hire the COO, or Operations Manager or General Manager that we feel will tie the whole thing together.
Wrong!!!!
Do sports teams hire the General Manager after the draft and after the team has made its additions and subtractions for the year, and expect the new GM to wokr wonders with players he had no role in choosing? They usually don't.
Even if the last hire, who we will call the COO for example sake, shares the entrepreneur's vision and values, he or she may not feel the chemistry is right among the team members. Or he/she may get a different feeling about certain individuals. If we trust our COO then, he or she needs some leeway in creating their own team.
Does that mean we allow our carefully chosen employees to be fired subject ot the whim of the new hire? No, of course not.
But it does mean that we have to be willing to listen to opinions other than our own, and hear the reasons why the COO believes certain individuals don't fit the bill. We entrepreneurs may have been blind to certain traits of some of our employees who were with us from the beginning or were good at certain stages of the company's growth. Some can only grow so far and we fail to see that they don't fit the company's current needs.
If an individual's success is going to be based upon the quality of work coming from direct reports, he or she needs some leeway in choosing them and developing them. There may be some "untouchables" that have a strong history of performance. There may be some that hold too much institutional knowledge to let go right away. The COO needs to be apprised of the importance of trying to make it work with these folks.
On the other hand, the entrepreneur that has built a company to a certain point cannot just turn over full control to a COO and watch him or her dismantle what has worked well just for the purpose of asserting total control.
Some of us have waited for years for the time to turn over operating control to someone else so we have time to strategize and think about the big picture. But, we cannot do so without a strong degree of accountability in place. The COO needs to understand that any move made needs to be justifiable and run past you.
I have had a COO fire my lawyer and end other long term relationships to put his own people in place. I gave him the space to do so without asking for his rationale. In the end, the freedom I gave him came back to haunt me.
Don't sacrifice your judgment just to give a COO room to operate.
Don't let a COO get away from being accountable to you for decisions taken.
Don't sacrifice your operating principles or values for this key new hire that completes the puzzle.
It is your company and don't forget it.
Always consider options and consequences.
Don't turn the desire to give up running day to day operations into total abdication. You could easily lose your kingdom.
And be careful not to diminish what you have by hiring one person to whom you give the power to bring you down. Don't subtract by adding.
The whole is supposed to be greater than the sum of the parts, not less.
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