I Use Top-Down Leadership Even Though Nobody Thanks Me For It

I’ll confess something here: I’ve been told by team members that I’m “too top-down.”

Not just once. Several times.

Not every time, but close.

When you become a leader, everyone wants to practice “republican leadership.”

This is especially true when trustworthy team members, meaningful goals, and expectations from those around you all come together. Everyone cooperates, problems get discussed openly at every turn, and things move forward with everyone on board. The workplace is happy and the team gets along well. Everyone wants that kind of scene.

And yet, there are moments when you notice something is “missing.”

It’s “driving force.”

Fruitful, constructive discussion. A reasonable development schedule. An unstrained budget plan. The right collaborators at the right milestones. The right technology and the right working environment.

”(…but can we actually win with this?)”

Startups are almost always aiming at unreasonable goals. For example, “exponential revenue growth,” “dominating the market in two years,” or “revolutionizing the XX market.”

If you want to stack up appropriate things, appropriately, in appropriate amounts, and do reasonable, ordinary things, maybe you should skip startups altogether. Sometimes you need a kind of madness.

Turn a plan meant for 1 into 1.2, finish something meant to take a year in 10 months, and if it fails, be prepared for instant death (bankruptcy).

You need to bring that level of unrelenting greed.

Can everyone actually be made to share that kind of common understanding?

Would it emerge naturally, on its own?

I believe that’s impossible.

What’s appropriate and reasonable can be arrived at through discussion. Give excellent team members enough time, and they will always reach the correct answer. But I don’t know how to reach, through republican-style discussion, an answer that is “roughly in the right direction but not quite correct.”

So when I judge it necessary, I lead top-down.

In most cases, no one thanks you for it. Usually the team gets thrown into disorder. On top of that, if it ultimately fails, the risk is extremely large. Even so, I use it. The reason is simple: I don’t want to regret later not having done what needed to be done when it needed doing.

I believe the worst outcome for a startup isn’t losing the competition and going bankrupt. It’s surviving aimlessly without ever challenging anything, never knowing what would have happened if you had.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2021/08/490/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.