When someone tells you there are only two types of leaders

Photo by YWEN ZHU.

The way I look at it, there's two types of people in the world...

Oh man, here it comes.

In this specific instance, the folks on the phone are co-founders. One founder talked himself into a working theory that the organization is made up of people who are circles or squares. His position is that the square humans aren't bad humans. They just aren't like the circle humans. He, himself, is a circle human. And that lack of shape-homogeneity is causing strife within the organization. The solution, he feels certain, is to hire more circle people.

Perhaps there are only two shapes of humans in the world. Gonna put that under the ol’ Anything Is Possible umbrella we keep handy for just such occasions. Sure, let’s say you’ve got an org full of shapes instead of people. The number one rule of leadership development is that there’s no growth without reflection. So come sit a spell and let’s reflect. How’s that two-shapes-of-humans theory actually playing out?

If we keep hiring people who can't be successful, where are we learning and adapting our hiring and onboarding process to get to something better? And if we have work happening but it's the wrong work, where are we establishing a vision for the org? Setting clear goals? And then, crucially, where are we managing people to that vision and those goals to good effect? We can see all the effort that's gone into the circle v square pontifications. But where is that other work happening? Oh it isn't? It is just not happening at all and you say it's hard to get things done in your org. Interesting. Very interesting.

If you're starting to get dizzy or looking for the nearest pillow so you can scream into it, please know that this shit comes up all the time. Reductionist nonsense is incredibly popular, particularly as a stand-in for developing any actual skill. And it is a hallmark of unconscious incompetence.

We are all trapezoids

We hear reductionist nonsense from all sorts of folks. And the way you can spot it a mile away is that it starts by flattening the richness and nuance and complexity of the human condition into buckets. In the case above, circles and squares. But more generally...

An oversimplification that removes agency or accountability from one party (often founders or execs). A rewriting of an organization's story so the main plot isn't about a leader's inability to manage. Or the abdication it represents to cash the paycheck while you are under-equipped, and fail to put in the work to get the skills you need. It's not about being a fuck up. It's just about getting unlucky.

So a few weeks ago when we saw Paul Graham's Founder Mode stuff making its way out of the bar at the Rosewood and into DealBook, it was like, ok, this is just more Puzzle Theory shit. We've seen this before. We will see it again. Yes, yes. Founders are from Mars. Managers are from Venus. And never the twain shall meet.

We are now multiple news cycles into declaring allegiances to buckets or modes or planets and it just feels like we are officially in the stupidest version of the timeline.

There's no chicken in there

You know the genre of TikTok video where a chef gets some janky-ass takeout food and turns it into something edible? Susur Lee literally washing off the Panda Express chow mein noodles? Chopping up the breaded chicken and pointing at it, irate? "There's no chicken in there! It's just fried dough!" OK, great, so we have our table set, then.

The core of Paul's post — the bit of chicken under the dough — is that founders have a different kind of connection to their business. As founders, and people who have worked in founder-led businesses, this rings true. Founders contain multitudes and are all over the map in terms of competencies, obviously. But, broadly, the founders we know feel a higher level of entangled identity with the businesses they run than other executives or non-founder CEOs.

Founders often have a very powerful intuitive sense of what's important to the business. Not because they're mystical creatures or bred from some kind of special stuff, but because they have the longest view of the context of the organization. They have probably made more material decisions on behalf of the organization than anyone else, and are de facto experts in how that decision making tends to go. That's true whether their decisions are good or bad ones, by the way! Founders often make very bad decisions! Have we mentioned that they are not superhuman? That's important and will come up again!

What has happened since Paul's post can mostly be understood in terms of founders seeing the post, connecting it to their own frustration about their inability to manage their org as it has grown, and boosting it as a way to re-assert. Frustrated and out-of-their-depth founders often try to re-assert. It's a mixed bag.

Beyond the bluster, it's hard to see what the actual system is that they're arguing for, though. Like, the strawman they're arguing against is clear. Strawmen usually are. Paul thinks that founders shouldn't hire disconnected and siloed managers who block communication, and lie to them. That's a great tip! They also shouldn't spit into the wind but it's hard to see how that qualifies as brilliant advice.

What's it arguing for, specifically? We know, we know, founder mode. Founders should be deeply involved in the day-to-day of the business, across levels of the organization. Like how Adam Neumann was at WeWork, right? Tom Preston-Werner was so founder mode at GitHub that he got personally involved in silencing an employee who was sexually harassed. Tobi at Shopify has been a vocal supporter of founder mode, too — should we assume that the holocaust-denier selling merch on his platform is something he's personally involved in?

No. Presumably that's not what founder mode means.

What's it called to do it right?

The good version of this is so good. Founders who can bring clarity — strategic clarity, values clarity, a clear story of who we are and who we serve and how and why — have built phenomenal, enduring organizations. They don't do it by muscling everyone else aside, and they don't do it by, ahem, hiring smart people and getting out of their way. They do it by bringing those people along. They establish priorities, align teams around those, delegate effectively, make accountability lines clear, and give people opportunities to step up.

That's management. It's not a fucking mode, it's not a switch on the back of your head, it's a set of skills. It's learnable, and we know it because we've worked with plenty of founders to help them learn it. The effort spent on essays trying to give founders some puzzle theory excuse for why they don't need to learn those skills is such a waste. A waste that gives those founders permission to do some real harm along the way.

The secret truth. The truest taxonomy of leadership out there. Based on our work with thousands of leaders across industries and around the world. Is that there are two types of leaders. Those who have management skills. And those who don't have them, yet.

— Melissa & Johnathan