17 November

Somewhere out there, a founder is starting to feel like his dream is being hijacked. He backed the decision to hire a CEO — he didn’t want to run the day-to-day — but as the new leader made decisions he wouldn’t have made, frustration turned into resentment. He stopped engaging. He buried himself in the product, worked from home more often, and — perhaps unconsciously — held back information, afraid of fueling what he saw as a misguided direction.

Somewhere out there, a new CEO is doing his best to scale a high-potential tech company. But his biggest roadblock is something he never anticipated — it’s the very person who hired him. The more the CEO tries to accomplish, the more the founder gets defensive. And the more the founder gets defensive, the more the CEO does too. He isn’t trying to take anything away — he’s trying to do what he does best.

Consider this:

Letting go is hardest when identity is on the line.