Our Companies, Ourselves

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An overidentifier may also conflate controlling her business with controlling her life--and lo, a micromanager is born. "One reason these people often refuse to delegate is because they want the company to express their sense of what's right," says Michael Maccoby, president of the Maccoby Group, a management consultancy in Washington, D.C. "But people who make the business an extension of themselves can't grow because they can't give up anything to anyone else--it's all them."

Perhaps the greatest danger of equating yourself with your company is that it can lead to an unwillingness to incorporate elements that don't look like you. Homogeneity is bad for the gene pool; yet entrepreneurs routinely hire people who replicate their own strengths and weaknesses, sometimes using phrases like "not a good cultural fit" to disguise their true feelings.

David Dotlich encountered that particular trap while running CDR International, a $20 million executive-development firm that he sold to Mercer Delta two years ago. (He is now president of Mercer Delta Executive Learning Center, in Portland, Oregon.) Dotlich admits that for some time he valued only the opinions of those managers cast in his likeness: entrepreneurial types focused on growth. He saw himself as a marketing and client- development guy, and so he built a business where marketing and client-development guys ruled.

Many years, many near deadline misses, and many cost overruns later, Dotlich finally created an environment where both top- and bottom-line managers could challenge him, and he would listen. "If you want commitment, you've got to give people voice," Dotlich says. "I lost good people from not knowing that. Of course, at the time I thought they were bad people."

The true acid test comes when an entrepreneur is urged to hand the reins of leadership to someone else. At that point, many CEOs still feel as though they are their companies. But they must accept that their companies are going to stop feeling like them. "If you're going to grow a company you've got to be able to let go," says Maccoby. "Bill Gates doesn't think Steve Ballmer is like him, and Bill Gates is not interested that Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is Bill Gates. He's interested that Ballmer creates."

So how do you avoid excessive identification with your company? One approach may be to minimize the time you're alone at the top. Develop internal talent by all means, but also recruit senior managers who haven't imprinted on you, as baby ducks do on their parents. Set up mechanisms to keep your own role in perspective, such as 360-degree feedback in which a partner, a second-in-command--or even a coach--will warn you if you're taking things too personally. And adopt team decision making from the get-go. Collaboration is an antidote to overidentification.

"What's most important to avoid overidentifying is to be completely honest with yourself--to listen to your voices of doubt," says Bennett, who's taking a breather from entrepreneurship to consult as a Web developer. (He still dreams of resuscitating RoomsOf.com.) After all, if the failure of your company means the failure of you, you're going to do your damnedest to pretend that all's going swimmingly, even when it's not. Bennett says that had he listened more closely to his own doubts he would have spent less time obsessing about his product and more time renegotiating the contract with his software licenser to come up with a better revenue model.

You also might take a page from serial entrepreneurs. Indeed, serial entrepreneurs may be the antithesis of overidentifiers. That's because they get their thrills not so much from the thing created as from the act of creation. "I intend to create companies until I die," says Nathaniel David, 38, who is on his third biotech firm, Kythera Biopharmaceuticals, based in Woodland Hills, California. "I don't think I identify really strongly with the companies I create," says David. "I resonate with teams of people. And so I define myself based on the mission and the team as opposed to the thing."

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