Five Leadership Laws Every Founder Should Follow

I've been going through Steven Bartlett's The Diary of a CEO — his set of 33 laws for building and leading. Five of them, clustered around team and culture, have stuck with me enough to change how I run things. Here's what each one says, and the move it points to.

Ask “who,” not “how”

The founder's reflex is to solve problems personally. Bartlett argues the higher-leverage question is: who already knows how to do this? Your time scales badly; the right person scales it for you.

In practice, it's the difference between learning payroll edge-cases yourself and owning the decision while handing execution to someone whose job it is.

The move — audit where you're still the “how” person on tasks a manager or specialist should own — and move them off your plate.

Create a cult-like culture

Great cultures aren't just perks. They're a strong, explicit set of shared values plus a sense of belonging — reinforced by rituals and a shared vocabulary: inside language, naming conventions, recurring ceremonies.

The counterintuitive part: he still wants room for dissent. The commitment is cult-like toward the mission, not toward silencing disagreement.

The test — can a new hire tell you, in week one, what your team actually stands for and how you do things differently?

The three-bar test

Every person on a team does one of three things to the standard: raises it, holds it, or lowers it. The discipline is to act on that quickly — promote and protect the bar-raisers, develop the holders, and remove the bar-lowerers fast, because a tolerated low-bar person silently licenses everyone else to drop.

Bartlett is explicit that he's never regretted removing a culture misfit sooner; the regret is always keeping them too long. It's the law most founders under-apply, because removal feels harsh in the moment.

Leverage the power of progress

Drawing on the “progress principle” research, he argues the single biggest day-to-day motivator isn't recognition or incentives — it's people feeling they're making visible progress on meaningful work.

So the leadership job is to make progress visible: break large goals into small, completable milestones, surface wins, and clear the blockers that stall momentum.

For operational teams — work that runs in cycles — payroll, vendor runs, content pipelines — needs built-in markers, so progress is felt, not just assumed.

Be an inconsistent leader

The deliberately provocative one. “Treat everyone equally” sounds fair but gets worse results, because people are motivated and reached differently.

A good leader is consistent on values and standards but flexible in how they manage each person — more direction for one, more autonomy for another, a different tone for a third. Inconsistency of approach in service of consistency of outcome.