Situational Leadership: Balancing Involvement and Ownership

Meet Fanny. Fanny is the founder of a successful startup.

Fanny comes from a product background

She starts to feel overwhelmed.

She wants to stay involved but understands that even a superwoman like her has limits.

While researching how other leaders are tackling this, someone on the VC Portco Slack channel she’s on shared an HBR article about an approach leaders at Apple are using.

She gathers her leadership team, and they examine everything going on right now. She asks the team to help her figure out how to show up most effectively. Fanny wants to balance being involved in the right things with being involved the right way.

Fanny and the team identify four categories:

• Areas of crucial strategic importance and/or high uncertainty/volatility - where Fanny is an expert. They decide that Fanny will play an Owner for these areas, but also that it doesn’t make sense to have more than one, maybe two such areas in flight at any point in time. They identify their current exploration of SMB through PLG as the area Fanny will Own.

• There are areas where Fanny is an expert, but they are quite stable, or the development/growth work is not as complex/strategic. In these areas, Fanny would engage as a Coach/Teacher, and someone else would be the Owner. They decided that Fanny would coach/teach Bill, a Product Manager, who would own driving and delivering their enterprise product’s summer release and overall roadmap.

• These are areas where Fanny isn’t an expert and are pretty stable. Fanny will Delegate initiatives in these areas to the appropriate leader, who will act as a mini-CEO/Owner for that area/initiative. They decide to approach both the work to introduce a new Financial management system and the introduction of MEDDIC in Sales to the CFO and CRO, respectively.

• Finally, there are areas that are outside of Fanny’s comfort zone but are crucial and volatile, for which Fanny will need to take the time to Learn. You guessed it—their foray into AI and how it might disrupt their product/market is one such area.

The team finds this taxonomy clarifying and liberating. It makes the situational leadership choices that they need to make as a team visual and explicit.

They also realize that across all of these areas, it will help them all engage at the appropriate altitude to ensure the work happens across functions in an integrative, iterative fashion and Bets are being validated/invalidated using small increments—whether those are new product developments or new business processes/approaches. This way of working will help them identify areas where they need to adjust their leadership involvement mode and provide steering guidance without meddling.

They agree that this “minimum viable change” is worth trying to see how it goes. Like other company bets, they will review and reflect on how it’s going frequently and tweak/adapt/rethink as needed.

They also understand that a lot is going on and they suspect that while situational/discretionary leadership might help, it might not be enough. They decide to reflect on that in their next leadership strategic session. Fanny has seen a “Bets Kanban” that one of her buddy CEOs started using to drive conversations about flow and focus at the company level, which she wants to show and discuss with the team.

PS Friends protect friends from unsustainable leadership situations. Would you please take a minute to think about who else should see this article and share it with them?

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