This is my attempt at answering the sixth (and final) question of the chapter on Clarity from the book “The Advantage”. After this is all about communicating and implementing. Exciting times.
This is a short chapter but it made me reflect on the difficulty of defining boundaries to the role of a single founder in a small company. Strumenta was founded as the continuation of the activity a started as an independent professional. And when I started working as an independent professional I was doing everything by myself. I was sending invoices, checking they got paid, writing articles, doing the technical work, post on social media, solve issues with the myriad national entities in France (I started when I was leaving in Lyon). Then my role was defined by subtraction: when I hired someone I dumped on that person some responsibilities but all the odds pieces remained with me. When I delegated I always felt reluctant to intervene because I wanted that person to shape their role, but it meant I provided very rare feedback and no guidance. So, not great.
This chapter is about the responsibilities of the executive team, and it is a bit more difficult to apply to a smaller organization as the executive team is basically me, the founder.
However, the division I see is this:
- G is responsible for info-products: design, create, and market them
- E is responsible for marketing. This means primarily bringing in more leads but also put in place the initiatives we do to communicate what we do: from our community, to social medias, to presentation in universities
- E is responsible for projects running smoothly. First of all clients should be satisfied, secondarily developers should be satisfied, and as third point the projects should be profitable
- I am responsible for defining a strategy and provide a framework for others to do their job in the most meaningful and useful way possible
Now as an homework I need to translate these answers into a Playbook to guide all of us in the future.