The Subtle Art of Staying Out of It

Welcome to REWORK, a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm your host, Kimberly Rhodes, and I'm joined as always by the co-founders of 37signals, Jason Freed and David Heinemeyer Hansen. A few weeks ago, on LinkedIn, Jason wrote a post about the subtle art of staying out of it. And he said he's, quote, been practicing the subtle art of staying out of it for a few years. So let's talk about it. Jason, do you want to get us started? I'm sure there's a fine line between jumping in and having opinions on everything

running in your company versus letting things happen. Kind of talklet's through this. Yeah, it's subtle, which is the point you can definitely stay too far out of it. But I'll start with a little story that just kind of hit me actually a couple days ago. I've been learning how to play drums again. I bought a drum set. And the same thing happened when I learned how to try to learn how to play guitar. I say try because I'm not good at either. But is especially with drums is that you tend as a new as someone who's new, you tend to grip the stick really

hard. And the same thing is true when you're playing guitar, you tend to like hold the neck too hard. You're too tense. You are literally gripping this thing. And when you grip it, a lot of bad things happen. Like you get fatigued quicker. You don't have as much actual control. You feel like you do because you're you're you're gripping it so hard. You feel like you're fully in control. But you actually don't you can't articulate the stick as much. You can't do as much. You don't get the same feel. You don't get the same sound. It's kind of one note. And it's you know, this is a weird parallel. But it it it it's

sticking with me to some degree. Sorry for the stick on there. I guess but like this this feeling that like if you grip something too tight. You don't get as much out of it. And actually you can't do it as long and you can't do it as well. And you don't have as many degrees of freedom. So I think that that in some ways is sort of what I'm trying to get out here, which is that, you know, especially, you know, in the early days when it's just two or three or four of you you are involved in everything because you you have to be. But as you grow a company as you hire other people as you try to grow other people as other people.

People grow for themselves. You've got to let up on your grip a little bit. I think to allow other people to flourish and to have more degrees of freedom inside the organization. Otherwise, everything is going to keep always falling back to you. Waiting for you to make the decision. People are going to be afraid to make their own decisions. So that's sort of the metaphor I've been thinking about lately is just loosening up on the stick loosening up on the grip a little bit. And that's equivalent to sort of this subtle art of staying out of it when you need to.

I think it relates really well to building a more resilient organization. As Jason says, you can suck up a lot of oxygen in the room. If you as a founder and executive step into every conversation and want to referee it. It's not even just making the decisions. Just your presence in a conversation in the threat is going to change the nature of that threat. And people are going to be more likely to delegate to you and like, all right, well, this senior person is in the room. They're going to make the choice.

And you're just not going to get the kind of decisions that someone's going to learn from nearly as well through that. Not that you can't learn from other people's decisions. You certainly can. But you probably learn more from your own decisions, particularly if you're allowed to make some mistakes. And I think this is where the subtle art comes in. What are the kinds of decisions that you are okay failing. And that's even too overstated.

Okay, being slightly different than what you would have preferred in some ideal world where you made all the choices. Looking at a spectrum of decisions and inside of a company like our company that's like close to 70 people. There's probably hundreds of decisions every single day that you potentially could be a part of. You could potentially referee. First of all, you'd go crazy. You drive everyone else crazy. It would not be sustainable. So you have to pick anyway.

There's a hundred daily decisions. How many can you weigh in on? Maybe in a very tight grip. You're weighing in on 25. What would happen if you weighed in on 10 or five or two or none. That day or that week or that month with the whole thing fall apart. If so, that should be telling you something. You know what? This is not a resilient organization. If I step out of it, I don't make all these decisions like the whole thing is just going to not run well.

But it's easy to say. I also think you can do the other thing. I've seen that too. Twitter for years was kind of the poster child of the absentee leadership organization. You had this large organization of a bunch of people being busy showing up. Well, busy or not busy. Some of these TikToks and the day in the life of a project manager at TikTok or at Twitter was all a fame cringe. What the fuck are you doing?

Stuff. But let's just assume that there were a bunch of people working on a bunch of stuff and it didn't kind of go. Right. It didn't go in some direction to move the thing forward when you look back upon the year.

So there's some place in between those things where you're like you're never there. No one is ever injecting the major risk that usually has to come from founders or executives or you're there and all the stuff all the time and no one but you can make any decisions like there's a sweet spot in there in between.

And I think I remember when Jason first wrote about this, I really went like, oh, do you know what? That's a really good point. I got to literally step out of some rooms that I actually feel like I have something to add to. There's more being added by me not being there. And by the way, to get back to the stick metaphor for a second to that point, there's a place very it's very subtle where if with what the drumstick at least if your grip is not tight enough, it'll just fly out of your hands.

That's the problem. David's talking about which is like if it flies out of your hands, you've sort of your absentee and you've so you've got to find that middle ground. But it's it's it's it's counterintuitive because I think a lot of entrepreneurs especially feel like they need to have a tight grip on everything.

And like if I go out of town, everything's going to fall apart, then you're a shitty founder. Like if you can't leave your own organization, you've built a terrible organization. It can't just be you. And that's one of the reasons why I really enjoy the fact that we embrace not working 80 hours a week, embrace having vacations, embrace having sabbaticals when I first moved to Denmark in 2020.

I took seven weeks off, I think it was probably the longest stretch of uninterrupted time away from the company that I had had in maybe ever. And came back after that and went like, do you know what? I'm really pleased with that. I'm really pleased with being able to step away for seven weeks and seeing a bunch of good work happen. A bunch of people just taking initiatives, filling in and so forth.

And I think teaching the organization that it's self sufficient, that it doesn't have to learn to help listeners that we can't do anything unless the top boss is there is just really empowering. And it's more fun for all involved. I think it's even more fun for the kind of person who do like to be involved in a lot of things. I like to be in a lot of things because I care about a lot of decisions, I care about a lot of the tech, I care about a lot of the things.

That's great. But also sometimes it's great just to like pull the plug two weeks or seven weeks. And then come back and go like, do you know what this is kind of like, no, if it's on, on metaphor, an orchard, right? If you plant a few seeds and you go like, oh, okay. And then you come back three years later, as in our case, we literally planted some seeds for some fruit trees.

And like, there's all these, there's all these lemons, they're delicious. Like how did that happen? Oh, well, it happened because three years ago, you planted some seeds and then there are some watering and all the things came together and like you weren't there micromanaging that seed all every day. Like we got to cut this little leaf and we got to just add this little nutrient. No, no, you just let things be for a while and that in itself can be the nutrient, especially for an organization.

And then you can just simply just to step away. Well, it sounds like taking the step of stepping away is a conscious decision. I want to go to this question that someone posted on a YouTube video.

It was a clip from a previous podcast episode talking about letting employees make some of their own decisions and someone wrote in and said, I'd like to hear Jason's take on when to take a risk on not overriding potentially small mistakes versus how to make the call to override a potentially big mistake. And then he says Jason, but David, feel free to chime in as well. How do you know when it's time to like step in to prevent something bad from happening versus letting it go?

Well, I think first of all, you don't really know if something's going to be great idea or bad idea anyway until it happens. So this part of this is a bit of humility going, well, if I suggest this, it's going to be better than what they suggested. You might have the experience and you might have the insight and the fortitude to like figure out that this is actually a better decision, but it also may not matter that much.

And by by making by stepping in and making the better decision, you've actually cut off something else from someone else, which is their willingness to step up and make a decision. Now they're going to wait for you to make the decisions next time. So it's almost like in those in many cases, the outcome probably doesn't matter as much. Sometimes it does, sometimes it does. And I can't really give you specifics there.

But there is a trade off and there is a cost to you making the call that didn't need you to make the call. And that is that this other person now feels like they can't make the call. They weren't given the latitude to make the call. They weren't trusted enough to make the call. And so you made this stupid decision that didn't matter anyway, but you took it away from someone else.

That is a pretty big deal and can be a pretty have a pretty large negative downsides there. So that's how I think about it more so that then like I know the right way and their way is the wrong way. I mean, there are some calls where you're going to make some of those, but most of them don't matter as much as you think on the upside, but they matter a lot on the downside. And so be careful is what I would suggest people do.

It kind of sounds like it's kind of crossing over into the line of like when are you micromanaging versus not. I think it, micromanagement is one way of looking at it. Another way is like who's the guardian for quality. And that is usually the part where I feel like there is a line somewhere it's fuzzy.

Because it's Jason says sometimes your perception of quality is one of those moments where it doesn't matter. And other times it's kind of sort of does. And the dynamics I found sometimes were stepping in as a founder executive to just realign like either urgency or quality. And so that's usually the two parameters where like this is just taking too long like someone might be making the decisions, but we got we got a speed it up. It's not running at the right clock frequency.

So maybe you need to make more mistakes, but you got to make it faster. We can't spend another six weeks on like getting this little part of the way if we're going to spend another six week of this. So setting those boundaries of like all right, so you get to make the decision, but it's within this scope like you figure out how to do it.

But by six weeks you got to have something and it's got to be it's got to be good. I think the few times where I felt like I wanted to sit back and then didn't was this feeling of we're going to ship something that's not good enough. The bar here is like for whatever reason on this particular thing has been allowed to slip to a point where people sometimes just like I want to ship I want to get it off. I want to do another thing next cycle.

I would do something else. Let's just get it out there and sometimes you're literally the only one left going like no, wait a minute. No, that's not good enough. Let's rather can it. One example I remember was we worked on this side bar concept for base camp where you had this particle come in.

It was kind of yours and navigation and so far. And we worked on it for quite a while. And then we had given it even more time and the people who were on it were obviously eager to ship when you already have something that feels late and then you put more into it than you're even more eager to ship.

And it had to not ship because it wasn't good enough, but that decision is a difficult one in a lot of cases for employees who haven't gotten used to make those kinds of decision to make because it's sort of one of those sunk cost things. Well, we've already spent eight weeks. If I say now we shouldn't ship am I responsible for squandered the eight weeks. Where does that lingo.

Yeah, so my question David from a technical perspective, I would imagine. I don't know, I think about the design side and so much of it is subjective. I'm assuming on the tech side, it is less subjective and there's either a right or a wrong. So maybe you would want to step in more or is that not true.

I don't think that's true. I think it's actually quite similar. Most technical problems can be solved in about a thousand different ways and a lot of the distinction between which ways better or not. Just have some subjective quality to it, but subjective is a really interesting term because subjective kind of implies that it's all the same, just different preferences.

Not what subjective means to me subjective to me means an individual's gut is making those decisions all gut are not trained equally someone who has been working for three years will have a very modestly trained gut someone who's worked for 15 years will have a very distinctly trained gut that doesn't mean the more training is always better.

It just means they've seen more things they've been in more situations and their subjective analysis is probably worth more not in every situation, but in most situations by default like that person is going to have more experience as long as that experience is kind of marinated competence.

There's plenty of people who've worked the same year 10 times right 10 years of experience, but it's like this is the same year repeated. But if you're doing your career well, let's put it like that, you know, you're not repeating the same year. So 10 years is worth more than one year.

And I think that that subject we got to pull subjective out of it's like it's all the same as your preference that's not what that word should mean it should mean like hey it's grounded in an individual's perspective, but those perspectives are not equal.

And it is sometimes I can imagine well, I can not even imagine I know that it is frustrating when I, for example, step in on a project and go like this is not good enough and I'm saying it's not good enough on the basis of my perspective and so on someone else who doesn't have that perspective will go like, why is it not good enough. This looks fine to me. And I go like no.

So one of the reasons I've been talking about lately is aesthetics. Sometimes people will come up with a solution that works. Customers will be non the wiser whether we ship this that is right now or we ship something else that I find very aesthetically pleasing, but that's part of that quality bar.

And not just in the business of shipping software, we're in the business of making good software that I want to look at again in three years because we've been around for 20. If every single time we had to like let's just ship it it's good enough. We didn't know up with a ball of mud that space came and we wouldn't want to work on it anymore so. That's a lot of here there and everywhere.

So the question is Jason, you mentioned early on when you first started when the team was much smaller, you felt like you needed to be more in it in the day to day. Was there a tipping point like for someone who's listening and thinking like I'm building this business at what point can I step more away and have the team run it with a point for you guys.

I don't remember exactly the point, but it's a gradual release of like I mean you just simply can't handle it all I would say you probably are making some bad decisions because you're jumping back and forth making them too quickly trying to decide on too many things you're not giving certain things deliberation that they need and I don't to me it's just a feeling it's also like probably one of the best things again like David was saying I've done the same thing not for seven weeks by took six weeks off.

And you just kind of realize that I don't need to be involved in all these things that I thought I needed to be involved with. But I know there is definitely a size where you know if you feel like you're a bottleneck I would say this is another place to feel like you're bottleneck that you probably are and you don't want to have any bottlenecks in your company certainly not you.

You're probably the worst one to have to because you know a billion things can happen you can hit by a bus you can whatever it like if you are the most important bottleneck in the business your business is a bit in trouble. Pretty pretty risky pretty flimsy actually all things considered so I guess that's how I would answer that question. Yeah I think there's a tipping point when your organization is capable of doing more things than you can keep in your hand at one time.

You simply cannot be involved with all the things at a level of quality of involvement that makes sense and at value and I think like that level is probably like I don't know three things. You can be really involved in like three things maybe four of you stretching it by the time you add a fifth thing to pay partial attention to that's getting a very thin slice of your attention bandwidth.

And that's the time we're all right so this project can either have me very heavily involved with 10% of my attention or it could have a hundred percent of someone else's attention to it. Are you literally 10 times better than that person and making these kinds of decisions maybe you are maybe you're not and I think the more of that I mean I sometimes marvel when I look at in the daily recaps I get from base camp one every day.

I get all the activity that's all in all the projects that I've access to and I go like holy smokes are we just moving on so many things so many decisions so many problems issues features at the same time I'm like I can't keep even a thin sliver of this in my working memory I can keep like I don't know two percent five percent of that first of all I better pick well.

I'm going to be worth something here I got picked the 5% of all the stuff that's going on that can really benefit from me being involved and then realize that the other 95% you should just lean back and marvel at the fact that you have an organization that can do that.

Jason you're right up one of the things that I love that you said you said quote this means getting used to being OK with decisions I wouldn't have made or designs I wouldn't have drawn up or provisions I wouldn't necessarily have put into place. I would imagine we found a company and you started being OK with some of those things is a challenge was that ever a challenge for you guys are letting go was was no big deal.

Yeah I would say well when I was doing all the design like you're naturally making all the decisions but I'll give you a quick example I'm working on this new ones product right now I sketched up an idea for for JZ is one of our designers on how I thought this particular thing should go we looked at early on that way he built it that way I kind of liked it I went away didn't pay attention for a few weeks and I asked to take a look at where we're at like last week or was.

We walk through it and totally changed and actually it's better it's better what he did was better it was simpler it's more direct we had this general idea that we should make things more direct like fewer things that are sort of hidden behind this and hidden behind that and he took that to heart and move this thing out of this thing even

I was really proud of this little thing we all were like you know what it wasn't worth it he moved it up there to be more in harmony with the other fundamental decisions about making things more visible.

And I'm glad he didn't ask me about it I'm glad he just did it because then I saw it I go yeah that's better I think how he would what would he have asked me or had he have asked me I probably would have talked try to talk him out of it because I was so enthralled with the previous decision we made and the fact that we already did it but it's better so so.

It's sort of around about wave it's a specific example of like I'm glad that I wasn't even involved in that decision and I love seeing people make decisions like that where something comes out the other end you like that's actually better or or more coherent or whatever than I would have made.

Now this decision it didn't this one of those examples where it probably didn't matter anyway but like it's not going to make or break anything but it is better because it's more in line with the general direction we're heading with other things and that makes it more coherent and here I am like repeating myself and talking about coherence but anyway that's that's an example of glad I wasn't there I'm glad he didn't ask me.

Yeah and I think that's really a good example because you mentioned several weeks and I think part time or part of the time the problem with partial involvement is that like you're still tethered to the thing like all right you're not paying a hundred percent attention to

all time but if you're constantly there on a regular basis to do it that presence is just going to is going to suck on a lot of oxygen what I found is and I think Jason you're better than this than I am I am more binary in my involvement that if I get involved with something it's very difficult for me to just do the 20% like there's like a tipping point for me personally where I go like all right I'm only an 100% like campfire when we were launching that for for a long time I was like all right I'm just going to sit back

a little lean back and then like let me just look at this one little thing and then it pulls me in and then suddenly I'm all in and then it doesn't up being a little all consuming I really enjoyed that experience and I hope that the product benefited from it and the people learn on

something from it but now we're working on the ones product number two and I've really gone like you know what I don't do that one again like here's a particularly one person Kevin who have been working with on the ones one you got a front row seat to the full hundred

percent engagement setting the tone this is where we're going to go do you want I think that's enough of of an injection of me into that process so now Kevin can really run with it on the ones two thing and then I have to have the disciplines to go like you know what I

should even open it like not for right now like I'll open it a bit I can't open it right now because I'm very open it it's gonna suck right in you know another example this is this podcast so you come up with the topics we're going to talk about you don't ask David and I what topics we're going to talk about next show like you post something in base camp of course when we're up to speed but you come up with that stuff like we could definitely say like before you

officially make the call run it by us first it will review it and we'll go back and forth but it's better that we don't do that so I think that's just another example of that it's not like a specific example we sat down and decided how this was going to be you just ran with it and that's the kind of stuff I love to see it reminds me of the book turned the ship around which is really one of my top three

favorite business books of all time we talked about blue ocean strategy a lot I don't think we've talked enough about turn the ship around I don't don't talk about at all basically premised on this exact concept that you will let people in your organizations on your ship decide what should happen because they probably sit with the most information they're going to say I intend to that's the phrasing on the nuclear sub which this principle has been derived from

pretty high stakes right I intend to fight the torpedo sir all right you better have the right information and I have to have a large degree of trust for you to make that call but that intention statement provides that opportunity that the more senior the CEO I think it's called on a sub can go like no can override but the default is no override the default is you're just picking the topics if you pick a topic that either Jason or I go like yeah no I don't think that's going to be good I don't

want to talk about that you put it out there when you said like no but how often does that happen one time out of a hundred shows or something like that it even that and I think as a general principle in the organization the I intend to and then you just go unless someone stops you you go you default to

trusting your own fingers and someone else someone senior someone a colleague can step in at some point and go like yeah but it usually doesn't happen and you fingers will get better this is the more you intend to and then follow through on it the more you learn from that the quick at the feedback cycle with this is what turned the ship around is about is about taking the worst performing nuclear submarine in the entire US Navy

and turning it into the best submarine in the US Navy by that form of management it's a really good book yeah some additional color on that too is traditionally as someone would go to the the the CEO or whatever and say may I turn the ship five degrees or whatever and and so it so that was the traditional way you ask and then they would confirm so you'd ask for the order and they would granted essentially something like this and so he basically said

that this is L L David Marquette I think was that was the guy's name he said I want you to come to me with intention I intend to turn the ship five degrees and what what's loaded into that is like this is going to happen like you're going you have to think about it you've had you've had to

thought think about it in a way where where you understand the implications because if you just go ask and someone gives you permission you don't really have to think about it because you're like I assume the other person thought about it to give me permission so it's a couple

subtleties they make a big difference and really gives ownership over the whole decision it's your decision now you're going to turn the ship five degrees that's something you did you're on the line for you're going to double check your work you're going to really own that burden and one of

the things that you can do is you can actually talk about is the fact that how do you find meaning in your work and some of the meaning you find in your work is being responsible is that it's on you that that meaningful burden of I'm making the intention I'm making the call here it's my ass on the line if you will usually it's not so you make a wrong decisions okay well unless it's firing the nuclear missiles at Moscow and that was the wrong

decisions maybe your ass is is toast but in most situations like it's not that dire the criticalities not that high and you have stated as an attention so someone else could step in if they go like no we

really shouldn't do this but you get to own the decision and that just gives you more more burden more meaningfulness in your working environment it's not just like all out of your hands okay well that is a great place for us to wrap rework is production 37 signals you can find show notes in trans scripts on our website at 37 signals dot com slash podcast full video episodes are on YouTube and Twitter if you have a question for Jason or David about a

better way to work and run your business leave us a voicemail at 708 628 78850 you can also text that number and we just might answer your question on an upcoming show.