The Superpower Series, Week 5 of 8: The Keeper of the Standard

Last week was the Rescuer, the founder who shows up when things go wrong. This week is the founder who shows up when things are almost right.

The Keeper of the Standard

The founder knows what great looks like.

You can look at a proposal, a product, a hire, a customer experience, a piece of writing, and instantly know:

Yes.

No.

Not quite.

That eye is a big part of why the company is any good. Customers feel it even when they can’t name it.

But “I know it when I see it” doesn’t scale.

Eventually, the company needs more people who know it when they see it.

And know exactly what makes it “it.”

Two Edits

A customer is upset about a job that went sideways. Your customer service lead drafts a reply and runs it by you.

You make two changes.

You add a date for when someone will be out to fix it. And you cut her opening line, “I’m so sorry for the frustration,” because you’d never open that way.

The first change is the standard. A customer with a problem always leaves knowing exactly what happens next, and when.

The second change is just you. Her opening wasn’t wrong. You just wouldn’t have written it.

She can’t tell which is which. Both came back marked up. So she does the reasonable thing. Next time, she tries to write like you.

Multiply that across every email, proposal, product review, and hire, and you get a company full of capable people quietly imitating you rather than asking what specifically is the standard.

When the standard lives only in your head, people don’t learn the standard. They learn you.

Making the Invisible Visible

The work is making the invisible visible.

What actually makes this excellent? What makes it mediocre? Which details matter? Which are personal preferences that you may decide to do differently?

Those questions are harder than they look. Your eye works in about two seconds. Explaining it takes ten minutes with a lot of “it just feels off.”

But look at what happens when you take that time. That customer email comes down to one sentence: they always leave knowing what happens next, and when. Your service lead can hit that without you. She can keep her own framing. But she knows to include the standard.

This isn’t about lowering the bar. For some founders, the standard is the reason the company exists. Keep it. But make it visible.

The point is a bar other people can see. A bar that can be discussed. Eventually, your team will even see things you missed. Because you taught them what’s important, and why.

Your Fingerprints Can Hide Your Standard

Founders have to separate the standard from their own fingerprints.

Because there is a huge difference between:

“This isn’t how I would have done it.”

and

“This isn’t good enough.”

A lot of founders never really make that distinction.

Just because you wouldn’t have done it that way doesn’t make it wrong.

Your fingerprints are all over the company, and plenty of them belong there. They’re part of why it has worked.

But a fingerprint isn’t a standard. It just feels like one from the inside.

Fingerprints may be how everyone knows you were there.

But eventually you want the success to happen without you.

A Question for This Week

Pull up the last thing you sent back with comments.

Go through them one at a time. Which ones are “this isn’t good enough”? Which are “this isn’t how I would have done it”?

For the first kind, write down why. That’s your standard, finally somewhere other people can see it.

For the second kind, try deleting them before you hit send.

There are six other roles founders often end up having to let go of. To see them all, check out my post on Substack.

Next week: The Source of Urgency. Nothing really becomes urgent until the founder feels urgency. You’ve delegated the work. Have you delegated the pressure?

— Jeff

The Superpower Series, Week 4 of 8: The Rescuer

Last week was the Chief Decider, the founder the team brings its decisions to. This week is the founder who shows up when things go wrong.

Most of the time, a little too soon.

The Rescuer

A major customer gets upset.

A deadline slips.

A leader gets overwhelmed.

A project starts to wobble.

And in comes the founder.

You make the call, calm the customer, rework the plan, get everyone aligned, and drag the thing across the finish line. Again.

Everyone is relieved.

And everyone has just learned something.

When things get bad enough, the founder will save us.

A big project is two weeks behind. Your operations lead has a recovery plan. It’s decent. It’s slower than what you’d do.

By Wednesday you’re in her meeting, “just to help,” reworking the timeline. By Friday the project is back on track, and you’re the one running it.

She goes back to her other work. Nobody says anything. And next time a project slips, she’ll do the reasonable thing.

She’ll call you sooner.

It Looks Exactly Like Leadership

Rescuing is a particularly seductive trap, because it often looks exactly like leadership. Sometimes it actually is leadership.

That’s what makes it so hard to catch. Nobody complains. The customer’s happy. The team’s grateful. You go home tired and a little proud. Every signal you get says do it again.

But chronic rescuing steals the learning that comes from carrying a problem all the way through.

That’s where the learning lives. The stretch where it’s going badly and the team still owns it. Where they have to make a call without knowing if it’ll work, live with what happens, and figure out the next move.

Take that stretch away and what’s left is a job where people work on things until it gets hard, and then hand them off to you.

Nobody learns to get out of a mess they were never allowed to stay in.

“What Are You Going to Do?”

Your work is to develop the capacity to watch someone struggle without immediately taking over.

To coach instead of solve.

To let consequences teach.

To ask, “What are you going to do?” instead of jumping in with, “Here’s what I would do.”

With a customer upset and a deadline slipping, “What are you going to do?” can feel like the least responsible thing you could possibly say.

Most of the time it’s exactly the opposite.

Letting consequences teach doesn’t mean letting the building burn. Some fires really are yours. Most are just uncomfortable to watch.

So stay in the room, if you want. Ask questions. Say what you’re seeing. Then leave the problem where it was.

The irresponsible thing is building a company where only one person knows how to get out of trouble.

A Question for This Week

Think of the last time you stepped in to save something.

What would have happened if you hadn’t? Sure you can create a worst case. Don’t.

What’s the most likely result?

And the next time someone gets out of a mess without you, notice the first thing you feel. If it isn’t pure relief, that’s worth a look.

There are six other roles founders often end up having to let go of. To see them all, check out my post on Substack.

Next week: The Keeper of the Standard. Yes. No. Not quite. You know great when you see it. That’s exactly the problem.

— Jeff

The Superpower Series, Week 3 of 8: The Chief Decider

The last several weeks we’ve been taking a look at roles that the founder needs to let go of when finally scaling the company. Last week was the Technical Expert, the founder the team brings its hardest problems to. This week is the Chief Decider, the founder the team brings its decisions to.

The Chief Decider

This one hides inside otherwise competent leadership teams all the time.

You’ve hired good people. They have titles, budgets, and teams. On paper, they have authority.

And still:

“Can you just take a look at this?”

“What do you think?”

“Would you approve this?”

Dozens of times a day. In the hallway, in Slack, by text at nine at night. Big decisions, sure. But surprisingly small ones, too.

You keep answering because you’re good at answering. Your call is usually a good one. It’s fast. It saves everybody a meeting.

And every answer makes your team more dependent on you.

From the outside, it looks like a leadership meeting where everyone talks, and then everyone turns to look at you. A VP who runs a seven-figure budget but won’t sign a modest contract without checking first. A decision that should take a day takes a week, because it’s waiting for a slot on your calendar.

Note the paradox. A founder who decides fast can still run a company that decides slowly. You can be both the most decisive person in the building and the reason nothing gets decided.

“You Decide” Isn’t Delegation

Most founders who see this do the obvious thing. They tell people, “You decide.”

It rarely works. Your team has spent years learning that the real decision happens in your office. “You decide,” with nothing behind it, sounds like a test. So they decide, and then they check. Or they bring it to you anyway, dressed up as an FYI.

The work isn’t telling people to decide. It’s making clear:

—Which decisions belong where

—What principles should guide them

—What risks are acceptable

—When something actually needs to come to you

That isn’t an email, or a declaration in a meeting. It’s a lot of conversations, some of them uncomfortable, until it’s real for everybody.

Including you.

The Decision You Wouldn’t Have Made

Then comes the hardest part. Someone makes a perfectly reasonable decision that is not the decision you would have made.

Not wrong. Different one. A vendor you wouldn’t have picked. A price you’d have set higher. A hire you’d have passed on.

Every instinct says weigh in. “Just a thought.” “Have you considered…” You mean it as input. They hear it as a reversal. And next time, they’ll check with you first. Again.

Notice the small jolt when you hear about a call you wouldn’t have made. It’s rarely about the vendor. It’s about who gets the last word around here, and how long that’s been you. You always got to be right. And its been holding you back for years.

If everyone has authority only when they agree with you, you haven’t actually delegated any authority.

Once you see that, letting a reasonable decision stand gets a lot lighter.

A Question for This Week

For one week, notice every time someone asks you “What do you think?” or “Can you take a look?”

For each one, ask yourself: whose decision was that, really? And did they know it?

There are six other roles founders often end up having to let go of. To see them all, check out my post on Substack.

Next week: The Rescuer. A customer gets upset, a deadline slips, and in comes the founder. Again.

— Jeff

The Superpower Series, Week 2 of 8: The Technical Expert

Last week was the Relationship Whisperer, the founder the customers trust. This week is the founder the team trusts.

Usually it’s the same person.

The Technical Expert

In some companies, the founder is still the smartest technical person in the room. Maybe it’s product or engineering. Maybe it’s manufacturing, finance, design, or some deep industry knowledge nobody else has fully developed.

Whenever something gets thorny, unusual, or high stakes, everyone knows where to go.

Your office.

That habit makes sense, because going to you is usually useful. You can solve it faster. You can save the team hours, maybe days, of flailing.

Then the company grows, and the line outside your office gets longer.

The engineer who could figure it out in a day lets you figure it out in ten minutes. Your head of operations brings you a problem with three options and waits to see which one you pick. Projects stall in the gap between “almost done” and “the boss hasn’t looked at it yet.”

Nobody decided this. It just became the fastest route, and smart people take the fastest route.

But every time you become the answer, you reinforce the same lesson: the hardest problems still belong to the founder.

Do that for a few years and good people stop reaching for the hard ones. They’ve learned where those go.

Then you wonder why nobody takes initiative.

Not information. Judgment.

The obvious fix is to get what you know out of your head. Write it down. Build the wiki. Record the walkthrough. All worth doing.

None of it is the real transfer.

The real transfer isn’t information. It’s judgment.

When someone brings you a problem, you hand back a conclusion. What they need is everything that happened before you reached it. How you think about the problem. Which variables matter and which are noise. What pattern you’re seeing. What you ruled out before anyone else had even thought to look.

That’s the part that transfers. The answer doesn’t.

So the next time someone walks in, try not answering. Ask what they’d do. Ask which variables they think matter. Ask what they’ve already ruled out. If you still see it differently, think out loud, the long way, so they can watch how you got there instead of only where you landed.

It will be slower. That’s the point.

A company doesn’t scale because more people know what the founder knows. It scales when more people learn how to think.

The Part That Lights You Up

Here’s what I see over and over. The founder agrees with all of this. Then someone walks in with a genuinely interesting problem, the founder lights up, and the answer is out before the question is finished.

That light is worth looking at. I have told clients to literallly bite their tongue when they feel that urge.

For a lot of technical founders, having the answer was never just a job. It’s where they feel most competent, most useful, most themselves. Solving the hard thing is the best part of the day. Handing it off doesn’t feel inefficient. It feels like giving away the evidence that you matter.

So when you catch yourself answering first, ask what you’re actually protecting. It’s rarely the quality of the work. It’s usually more about why you’re needed.

The expertise is real. It isn’t going anywhere. The question is whether it lives in one office or in the whole company.

Once you see what the answering was doing for you, letting someone else work the problem gets a lot lighter.

A Question for This Week

What’s the last hard problem someone brought you that they could have worked through themselves?

What would it have cost to let them? And what would it have cost you?

There are six other roles founders often end up having to let go of. To see them all, check out my post on Substack.

Next week: The Chief Decider. “What do you think?” is the most-asked question in your company, and it’s almost always being asked of you.

— Jeff