- Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t like to delegate.
- The Meta CEO called it one of his “most controversial” management principles on a new podcast episode.
- He thinks a founder should “make as many decisions and get involved in as many things as you can.”
Mark Zuckerberg says one of his “most controversial” principles as a business leader is that he doesn’t like delegating responsibility.
The Meta CEO discussed his management style on an episode of the “Morning Brew Daily” podcast released Friday.
“I think probably one of my most controversial leadership or management things is like I don’t actually believe in delegating that much.
“I kind of think the way a founder should work is you should basically make as many decisions and get involved in as many things as you can,” he said. “I mean you need to know where your limits are and where like you’re just thrashing people because you’re involved in something in a half-assed way and you don’t have all the context, but I don’t know. You need all these other awesome people because no matter how much time I put into all these things, there’s still going to be so much stuff that I can’t get to and we need awesome people who can do all the really important stuff that I’m not doing, but I don’t know.”
He continued: “That’s something that I guess I’ve just gotten more confident in over time, is just sort of feeling like hey, yeah I can go deep on all this stuff and push it in a direction that I think, and yeah not everything is going to go well in the near term but you just learn, rinse, and repeat. Do good work over a long period of time.”
Other aspects of Zuckerberg’s approach to running Meta have been under the microscope in recent years amid multiple rounds of layoffs affecting more than 20,000 employees.
Zuckerberg attributed some of the earlier cuts to mistiming big investments, including metaverse technology, and needing to cut back after overhiring during the pandemic tech and e-commerce boom.
Last year, he proclaimed a “year of efficiency” in an attempt to make Meta leaner by cutting out some layers of middle management.
Zuckerberg had said during an employee Q&A around that time that he didn’t want a “management structure that’s just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work.”
