The skills that help leaders build a company from the ground up aren’t always the skills that help it grow.

When I started Infragistics, I was used to solving problems myself. That was partly because I had to. We were a small company with limited resources and few people to hand things off to. If a task needed to get done, I did it. If a decision needed to be made, I made it. If something went wrong, I jumped in and fixed it.

Those instincts served me well and helped me build a company from a 10-person startup into a global organization with hundreds of employees across six countries. But eventually, they stopped serving me.

The bigger Infragistics became, the more I realized that being the person with all the answers was actually becoming a limitation. I couldn’t be in every meeting, make every decision or personally solve every problem. More importantly, if I kept doing those things, I was preventing other people from developing the judgment and confidence to do it themselves.

That was one of the hardest transitions of my career. I realized that the skills I had relied on to build the company were not necessarily the skills I needed to lead it. Over 35 years, I’ve had to rethink how I manage, how I develop people and how much control I’m willing to give up. I’ve learned that scaling a company requires a founder to make three fundamental shifts.

Early-stage companies often revolve around the founder’s judgment, and there’s good reason for that.

Source link