If The Shoe Fits: Stop Curating and Start Managing
by Miki Saxon
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.
Founders are a breed apart, especially young founders, with little to no business experience, let alone leadership/managerial experience.
I got a call from one I work with occasionally. After getting the information he had called for he took me to task over Monday’s post.
In short, he said that founders don’t have much time to spend on culture, let alone do the people-managing stuff I’m always writing about.
He went on to say that’s why people in young companies tend to be so similar. It’s far easier, not to mention more comfortable, to get stuff done when everyone has a similar mindset.
My response was that his mindset would do much to limit his market, so he would do well to plan on being a nitch player.
It was not appreciated.
Curating a team creates the same problem that curating freshmen roommate assignments created.
There’s no question that curation reinforces opinions, while eliminating conflicting ones, narrows people beyond from where they started and acts like fertilizer to unconscious bias and outright bigotry.
Curation, whether of roommates of team, has no positive effect, which is why colleges are going back to random freshman matching and companies are striving for more diversity. Duke eliminated curated matching.
Freshman year of college, Larry Moneta, vice president for student affairs at Duke explained, is about students “engaging with difference and opening their eyes to opportunities, and meeting entirely different people than the ones they grew up with or went to high school with.”
What this 26-year-old founder didn’t say (and may not even realize) is that some things, such as successful managing, are the result of hard-won experience, not “vision.”
There is a reason that more diverse companies have better results.
Just as there is a reason that managers who practice good customer service on their teams attract the best people, have lower turnover, and enjoy better personal career growth / stronger startup success (if founders).
Image credit: HikingArtist
