Startup Best Practices 1 - Situational Management

In response to yesterday’s post on management design patterns, many readers asked for examples of best practices. So I’m going to write about the management best practices I have been taught and I have observed in startups. This is the first post of that series. The first management technique is called Situational Management, one that my wife, a terrific manager at Google, taught me.

A manager’s most important function in a startup is to motivate employees to accomplish the business’s goal. Each employee’s motivation to work will vary with time, which means a manager’s style and goals should respond to those changes. The same management style doesn’t work across all employees, nor can one management style be applied to an employee over their career. In other words, effective management depends on the situation. At the highest level, there are four basic situations:

The image above is a 2x2 matrix with employee skill (defined as the ability to complete the job asked of them) on the x-axis and employee motivation on the y-axis. Each quadrant contains one situation:

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