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Investor Minute - Make Yourself Redundant as a CEO by Manu Kumar

Name: Investor Minute - Make Yourself Redundant as a CEO by Manu Kumar
Uploaded: 2014-05-08T16:38:46+00:00
Duration: 1 min 21 s
Channel: Royston G King
Description: In this Investor Minute, Manu Kumar argues that a founding CEO’s primary purpose is to become redundant by building a high‑performing team that can run…

8 May 2014 · 1 min

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1:21

In this Investor Minute, Manu Kumar argues that a founding CEO’s primary purpose is to become redundant by building a high‑performing team that can run the company without constant oversight. He contrasts two personal experiences: in his first startup he micromanaged every decision, becoming a bottleneck; in his second startup, after receiving feedback to "trust us" from the same team, he shifted to delegating authority and giving people room to act. This change liberated him, demonstrated that trust and delegation lead to better outcomes, and reinforced his belief that CEOs should focus on hiring, empowering, and eventually stepping back so the organization can operate autonomously.

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So I define the role of a founding CEO as to make themselves redundant. Right? That they need to build, hire, and build a team around them where the people can do everything better than they can. And eventually, like, if you follow this rule of trying to make yourself redundant, you've then built this amazing team around you and the company can kind of run by itself. Right? And I say, in fact, in my blog post, I talked about this where in my first company, that was not how things worked, right? Like I was the micromanager, every single thing had to go through me. And eventually I became the bottleneck in that company. And then in my second company, I went, I was working with the same team. And so I had already known them for a while. And I actually asked them like, so what can I do better? And one of the big pieces of feedback that I got from them was, trust us, we'll get it done, and just delegate, right? And that to me was a very liberating piece of feedback where it kind of taught me that, oh, I do not need to be this micromanaging type person and actually just trust people and give them enough rope to actually go try something. And that works a lot better.