You wanted someone better. Let them be better.

We want experience. Preferably on our terms.

Especially after being close to almost every decision in a company, it is easy to recognise your own approach as the sensible one. You know why the structure looks as it does. You remember the problems it solved. That history can be valuable, but it does not make every part of the setup self-evident forever.

Say we hire someone who knows advertising better than we do. She wants to try another message or structure. It feels unfamiliar. If that is reason enough to say no, we have bought experience and asked it to behave like a copy of us.

I think we need to distinguish what we want to accomplish from exactly how the work gets done. The goal, budget and what matters to the brand need to be clear. Leadership is responsible for creating that direction with the person taking on the assignment.

But inside those boundaries, there needs to be room for routes I would not have chosen. Otherwise the authority is fairly hollow. It is difficult to demand ownership while making every choice of method a vote in which the founder has the casting vote, the gut feeling and the right to change the question.

Authority has to show between meetings.

Writing independent in a job description is not enough. I want a concrete conversation about which decisions the person can make, which need agreement and when someone else needs to be involved. Unclear boundaries can leave people waiting for permission even while we say we want initiative.

Work through some ordinary situations before they happen. Can the person reprioritise the work? Change a test plan within the agreed budget? Ask other parts of the team for help? Taking responsibility is easier when the available freedom to act makes sense.

Ask for the reasoning before defending your own.

When someone does things differently, I want to try to understand what she sees. Which problem is she trying to solve? Which assumptions underpin the proposal? What would make her change her mind? Those questions make a better conversation than immediately explaining why we arrived at the current setup.

I need to be able to say no to a proposal, of course. But the objection should concern the business and the reasoning. An unfamiliar method is a fairly thin reason to stick with my own.

Follow up what you agreed.

If we have given room to test, the review should connect to the goal and conditions. What happened? What did we learn? Which parts of the assumption held? That is more useful than judging the work by how closely it resembled the way I would have done it.

When an attempt performs poorly, we need to see what was actually tested. I get no automatic victory because I preferred the old approach. If the review becomes a contest over who was right, we may wait a while for the next brave proposal.

The founder should not be the company’s ceiling.

Anyone who helped build the company may need to make an effort to give someone else’s way of working room. That applies to me too. My comfort with how we worked last year is no great measure of what the company needs now.

If I only accept solutions I could have come up with myself, I have set a fairly low ceiling for what the person can contribute. Perhaps the next question is not whether we need to recruit another sharp person. Perhaps it is whether we have built a way of working that leaves room for one.