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Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?

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Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?

#121

Post by stephc_int13 »

I've been in both camp, founder and employee in a startup.

From my experience, sharing is mostly bad.

Very often, you'll be tempted to share good news too early, and very often it won't materialize (startup life is a roller coaster)

This alone will erode the morale of your team.

But there is an other factor, many humans, when presented with data and problems, tend to at least think about solutions, and they dislike being ignored.

Their solutions and ideas might be good, but they are very often half-baked and everyone has different ideas and priorities.

In practice, when people are asking for information, they implicitly are asking for power.

Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?

#122

Post by tcgv »

Ken_At_EM wrote: post #25

Share it all. Complete transparency. Show them the cash flow. At your small size you will benefit from the additional trust and alignment this will bring. You may find yourself delighted in finding that many of your team can see and solve problems that you may have missed. You can be super secretive to combat the BigCo mentality like Apple when you have the first class problem of being a BigCo.

While I agree on the benefits of sharing information and always being transparent, one should be mindful on how to communicate strategic and sensitive information internally, specially with regard to junior staff:

- Avoid generating too much expectation, which can lead to frustration if things don't materialize, and impact team morale.

- Always provide context so the team can better understand how/why events took place and decisions were made.

- Think preemptively, put yourself into your team shoes, and try to address doubts that may arise from your communication upfront.

- Always give space for clearing doubts, and follow up to your staff to assess the impact of your communication. You'd be surprised in how many ways people can react to the same information.

With time, you get to better know your team, build trust, and become more effective communicating with them.

Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?

#124

Post by SnowHill9902 »

Ken_At_EM wrote: post #82
SnowHill9902 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great way to have leaks and create lousy hygiene around information security. Culture is most difficult to revert then. The default should always be on a need-to-know basis. Anything else should be justified.

Couldn’t disagree with you more.

No post body was provided.

Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?

#126

Post by SnowHill9902 »

outside1234 wrote: post #74
SnowHill9902 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great way to have leaks and create lousy hygiene around information security. Culture is most difficult to revert then. The default should always be on a need-to-know basis. Anything else should be justified.

There are very few startups that need to be in “stealth mode”. If anything, startups need to be more vocal to get themselves on the map and to do way way more customer development.

Ok sure. Better for me - weak competitors.

Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?

#127

Post by morelisp »

Ken_At_EM wrote: post #88
morelisp wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also used to think this way, until I tried being fully transparent with my team. There really are people whose mindset is 100% "what should I do?" and never "what are we doing?" I think the mistake is assuming it correlates with seniority or skill or something; it seems to be independent of both. On the other hand, I'd never want a "what should I do?" person as an early startup hire.

My experience has been that there are employees who don’t really want to understand the big picture and just focus on their work. I have never seen transparency hurt the productivity of these employees. They know they can look and see the big picture any time, they just don’t bother to look:

"Transparency" means different things to different people. I suspect we agree, because my solution to the problem is to make it clear to everyone that they can ask me anything and I'll tell them everything I legally can.

But for some people "transparency" also means a more active communication of this information, and this definitely confuses some (other) people because they will consistently interpret "we want to do X" or "we are going to do X" as "I should, right now, do (sub-part of) X".

Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?

#128

Post by majormajor »

musingsole wrote: post #31
Ken_At_EM wrote: post #25

Share it all. Complete transparency. Show them the cash flow. At your small size you will benefit from the additional trust and alignment this will bring. You may find yourself delighted in finding that many of your team can see and solve problems that you may have missed. You can be super secretive to combat the BigCo mentality like Apple when you have the first class problem of being a BigCo.

Not everyone wants all the information and with many business plans, knowing the full version might be confusing to people working on today's stuff. I advocate balancing full transparency (I certainly don't mean to hide any info!) with a culture that can create a time and place for conversations that might go beyond today's work.

Sometimes "the full version might be confusing" is the same as "I haven't done a good job of explaining the full version," whether that's the roadmap for a company or a department or even just a team.

Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?

#130

Post by vageli »

Spivak wrote: post #75
morelisp wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also used to think this way, until I tried being fully transparent with my team. There really are people whose mindset is 100% "what should I do?" and never "what are we doing?" I think the mistake is assuming it correlates with seniority or skill or something; it seems to be independent of both. On the other hand, I'd never want a "what should I do?" person as an early startup hire.

> On the other hand, I'd never want a "what should I do?" person as an early startup hire. This doesn't apply to tanks or healers, only dps. Playing tank as an infra person I would do my team a disservice if I didn't make myself available on a dime to unblock my team. Big picture is fine for the planning meetings but on small teams I'm usually the only one, I have a bunch of cooldowns to keep track of, and don't alwa…

Healers don't go around asking who needs healing, they see low health and prioritize. That is not asking "what should I do?", that is being proactive about the needs of the team.
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