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.
Contrary to common misconception, giving feedback—insightful, useful feedback—is surprisingly difficult. Why? Because, as legendary venture capitalist Ben Horowitz once observed, it’s completely, utterly unnatural.
“If your buddy tells you a funny story, it would feel quite weird to evaluate her performance. It would be totally unnatural to say: ‘Gee, I thought that story really sucked. It had potential, but you were underwhelming on the build up then you totally flubbed the punch line. I suggest that you go back, rework it and present it to me again tomorrow.’ Doing so would be quite bizarre, but evaluating people’s performances and constantly giving feedback is precisely what a CEO must do.”
Sometimes it’s tempting to feed our employees a shit sandwich—more on this momentarily—and give vital feedback in other completely awful ways, but it’s crucial to your career as a manager that you resist the urge to do so. As a cautionary tale, here are three uniquely terrible ways that inexperienced managers often give feedback and how you can avoid doing this yourself.
The rule is one operator per station. But when nobody’s watching, there might 17 people for 13 stations on the assembly line at one mobile phone manufacturing plant in Southern China.
When managers comes around, though, they’ll see 13 operators, one for each station, exactly as prescribed by the leaders. Even with company values like learning and continuous improvement, this plant’s employees scrambles to hide exactly the kinds of refinements and creativity that management seeks.
Transparency is often touted as a vital ingredient for the best teams. And it’s true. For people to move fast and think for themselves, they need ready access to the information they need to do their job. Failing to provide a foundation of common knowledge and creating an uneven distribution of information opens the door for inefficiency and unhealthy power imbalances.
But the transparency paradox arises when there’s no trust and autonomy. Actually, it’s more like counterproductive monitoring — one-sided visibility to benefit the manager’s curiosity rather than equip the employees to do their best work.
The popular depiction of the CEO is the titan of industry who rules with an iron fist. The CEO’s will is the employees’ command.
Not so at Supercell, a remarkable Finnish company that’s making $2.5 million dollars every day and has been described as “the fastest growing company ever.” Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen, calls himself “the world’s least powerful CEO”, and that’s not the surprising part. What’s incredible is that Paananen made himself a weak CEO by design:
This company beat even Zingerman’s which is reported to be generating over $50 million in revenue per year.
(This is the last part of the 3-part “Manager’s Series” by our friend, productivity expert and CEO of Real Life E time-coaching company Elizabeth Grace Saunders.)
Feeling ignored is one of the most infuriating situations you can be in — but it’s your job to control how you react to it.
When you’ve tried so hard to address team members’ emotional hurdles to accepting change and walked them through how to apply the change to their work situation, your blood can start boiling when you still don’t see the desired results. You feel ignored. Have you ever caught yourself thinking “How could they be disrespectful?” or “Do they notice? Do they even care?”
Before you stomp over to people to tell them exactly how you feel about their impertinence (or, send them that fiery Slack or email), step back and take a deep breath . . . and one more, just in case. Count to four, inhale. Count to four, exhale.
Managing a remote team is about employee empowerment, not oversight.
Remote employees that excel are self-motivated, reliable and results-driven. As a manager, your job is to create a supportive environment that encourages employees to manage their own projects so you can focus on building a culture of trust and communication.
Here are seven things a remote leader must have to set their team up for success:
Changing your mind doesn’t have to be impulsive or accidental; you can purposefully choose to put your beliefs to the test too.
First, decide what your most fiercely held beliefs are. Then, throw your very best arguments against them until you believe something else. Going out of your way to change your mind in this way is the key to growth.
As physicist Richard Feynman explained: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
He also said, “We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress. I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong.”
The more you challenge your beliefs, the more accurate they will be, leading you to make better choices. This is the larger benefit changing your mind offers, but there are many more.
Startups are depicted as workplaces with pool tables, lego-speckled break rooms, desks adorned with Star Wars memorabilia and even in-house cafeterias. In reality, startups are two sleep-deprived founders squeezed into a co-working space with a small team and a bunch of strangers, trying to make something out of nothing.
In the early days, it’s difficult to focus on how to build company culture. You don’t have the cash to invest in an office space, the time to invest in employee growth, or the experience to deal with interpersonal problems. Under these constraints, most founders focus on everything but culture and leave it as a problem to be addressed later down the line.
But the biggest existential threat to your company isn’t lack of planning or lack of resources — it’s people problems. Two-thirds of early-stage startups fail from interpersonal issues, according to Harvard Business Professor Noam Wasserman. If you don’t put effort into cementing a strong team relationship now, your company will fall apart at the first stumbling block.
Here’s how you can lay the foundation for a healthy culture early on.
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:
What do some of the most well-known companies today (Pinterest, Yelp, Box, POPSUGAR, Asana, MailChimp) have in common? They all care immensely about their brand experience. What else do they have in common? They all use a service called Envoy to extend that brand experience to their front desk, creating a warm, delightful and quick check-in process for visitors.
Envoy is a visitor registration platform that’s been a game-changer for how guests are greeted in workplaces around the world. As part of the sign-in process, they automate badge-printing, host notifications and signing of NDAs and other legal agreements. Founded in 2013, Envoy now serves 6 million visitors in over 50 different countries.
As we learned recently, the small team of 37 people was able to inspire team motivation through high morale and fast growth, thanks, in part, to their favorite productivity tool. Here’s how they use I Done This.