Often, the weakness of an organization is the strength of the founder. Sounds contradictory, since the founder is what started the organization with his or her strengths. But since the strength is already there, the founder never has to build up the capacity in the organization for that skill.
Why? Because, there will always be an aspect of the organization that has to be addressed first: Things that are more urgent, more boring to the founder's interests, or bringing more added value (planning, marketing, logistics). Add to that, that when the founder is good at sales/coding/designing, you can bet it will be a long time before they hire someone better than themselves in that area. Because who is good enough? To make things worse, the real hard thing for most founders is to allow themselves to become expendable.
The flip-side is also true. The weakness of the founder can become a strength of the organization. But only if, the founder has the wherewithal to see that it needs to be addressed, ánd is humble enough to accept the changes for the greater good. It is possible for, say, a founder that dislikes order and processes to hire someone to implement these. But only if the founder lets the employee get to work. That requires that the founder sees the value of the processes, and comes to enjoy rather than resent the presence of them.
In both cases, the real work the founder has to do is not the job interviews, administrative work, or strategic insights of hiring. It's the personal work with their ego or with their allergies.
In our conversation on De Gebakken Peren, Charlotte said that one of the blessings in disguise was that she simply is bad at a lot of minute, administrative, and planning elements of the business. That requires partnering up or hiring people at an early point. Plus, she did the work to realize that she isn't in it to look cool. She gets a kick out of creating a system that can work without her rather than being essential to the operations.
This is one of the insights of my conversation with Charlotte van Leeuwen of Bord&Stift on De Gebakken Peren. We also talked about horizontal organizations, steward ownership, what an economic system should be like, and her obsession with personal growth. Listen here.
