Delegation is one of the hardest management tools for leaders to learn.
We all understand that micromanaging your employees isn’t good for anyone, but when you’re used to being involved in everything, it can be hard to let go. It gets easier as you hire great people and implement sound processes—watching your company grow without your fingerprint on everything is a beautiful thing.
Perspective helps too.
For many employees, the holidays offer a welcome break in routine. But for team leaders, the last few weeks of December put a pin in their team’s productivity.
When so many people take off at the same time, it leaves the few remaining souls at the office with a ton of work on their plates. They need to get more work than usual done, and in less time.
Every second they spend in their typical in-person daily standups/ Email Standups (that would otherwise help them track progress) eats away at time they could be using to pore through their mountains of work.
Frequent checkins are an important part of ensuring individuals are on track to meet their goals and working as a team. But especially when the holidays roll around, managers need to alter how they run standups and create additional support, without sacrificing their employees’ time or autonomy.
Here are some ways to revive your daily standups and simplify your workflow during holiday madness.
Harvest is a multimillion-dollar, fantastically profitable, growing business that boasts thousands of customers from freelancers to Fortune 500 companies. The company has grown to over 30 employees and boasts one of the most beautiful tech offices in New York City.
But it’s how they did it that’s most impressive — over the course of 10 years, without a dime of outside investment, 100% bootstrapped, and in the city of New York.
In an age of tech celebrity, high-profile fundraises, and billion-dollar acquisitions, it’s how Harvest founders Shawn Liu and Danny Wen’s achieved success that you’ll find incredible. What Shawn told me was their secret ingredient is something you’ll never guess.
You can also check out this company’s culture which is reported to be making over $50 million per year.
Not only is Google rated the #1 place to work year after year, but it’s one of most valuable companies on earth. And that’s by no coincidence. To get there, Google spent years perfecting their employee perks to create a positive and highly-productive environment.
But Google has only been able to grow into a $360 billion company by trying bold new things and constantly iterating their systems—not by blindly applying the successful models of other companies.
To succeed as a startup, you also have to be careful not to just adopt trendy fads, but rather find what works best for you through constant iteration. In fact, there are tons of companies that do the opposite of what Google does and thrive as a result.
Here are some examples of super successful startups that refrained from Googlifying their environment.
You walk into your office on a Monday morning and are instantly overwhelmed with the amount of work you have that week.
Just as you’ve figured out how to cram all your meetings and projects into your schedule, you look up from your desk and are instantly full of dread. Your chatty coworker is headed right toward you and has chosen you as his next victim. Well, there goes the better part of the morning.
Of course, having a great social relationship can boost company culture. Once in a while, some water cooler talk can be a nice break from your hard work, but some people take this way too far.
Some will come by your desk every few hours, and even remote workers might incessantly ping you on Slack. According to a survey conducted by talent mobility company Lee Hecht Harrison, talkative coworkers are the #1 disruption at work.
Even though having a chatty worker in your office is different than difficult coworkers, you must know how to deal with them.
Here are the different kinds of chatty coworkers, and how to keep them from disrupting your day.
You’re being interrupted every three minutes to handle something urgent. You have a report that’s due at the end of the day. But your coworker just called you into a meeting that will “just be a minute.” When you get back, you just have to send a quick email. After you start on that email, another coworker asks you to jump on a client call.
You don’t think you’re procrastinating because you’re busy every moment. But just because you’re super busy doesn’t mean you’re being productive. You’re actually guilty of a subtle form of procrastination known as priority dilution. This means you are distracted from focusing on your most important work. But it’s not your fault that you’re getting consumed with all these small disruptions. Your brain is actually hardwired to handle them. Here’s the science behind managing the small disruptions so you can be more productive.
The journey of the entrepreneur is to figure out what matters. We know that starting a company requires extreme focus and prioritization. We know that a focused culture can make an unbeatable team. We know that humility creates adaptability.
But figuring that “one thing that matters” is no easy task. We have to navigate a jumble of possibilities and complexities of running a business, on top of the cottage industry of abundant, contradictory, and just plain bad business advice.
These pieces are the thoughtful reflection of industry leaders on what matters, above all else, in building a successful company from scratch.
Just like the poor souls on Hoarders, you may not realize you have a problem.
Think of all those little times in the day when you stop what you’re doing to ask “Emma, how does the copy machine work?” or “Bryan, how many days have you taken off this month?”
They seem like small-fry problems, but they are actually issues of employee empowerment. You stop, gather the information, and move on. But they all add up to a huge productivity drain for you and your company, for one single reason: knowledge hoarding. Information is stored in particular places, and particular people are responsible for it.
Knowledge hoarding is normal but dangerous. Here’s why:
It takes a truly noble cause to inspire three graduate students to put dissertations on hold so they can start a company. For the founders of MindMate, that cause was helping people who suffer from dementia.
The University of Glasgow’s Patrick Renner, Rogelio Arellano, and Susanne Mitschke created an app that empowers those with dementia to live as independently as possible. MindMate comes with cognitive stimulation games, reminder tools, and a “Getting to know me” section where people can save personal information.
Your startup is on the rise. You’ve added four great developers, six customers have signed on, and you’ve reached a revenue milestone of $2.4 million ARR. But just as things are getting peachy, you notice the company isn’t shipping as much code as before.
What makes productivity problems so hard to deal with is that they’re hard to detect. They’re often so entrenched in culture and old systems that they seem invisible. At $2.4 million ARR, you are now far removed from the day-to-day routine of team members, making it difficult to spot inefficiencies on the ground.
We built I Done This 2.0 to help teams bring lurking productivity killers to light. We want to help our customers spot the most common production killers out there. I Done This empowers you to find out what’s going wrong with productivity and address the problem at its source. Here’s how your startup can track down invisible productivity killers and solve them with I Done This 2.0.