This article was written by Ken Leaver who comes from a product & commercial background. He has founded multiple companies and held senior product positions at SEA tech companies like Lazada and Pomelo Fashion.
Now Ken runs his own agency that helps early stage startups with content and traction called End Game.
Guest Author: Ken Leaver
Have you had a manager that prided himself on saying things like.. “I don’t really care how you do it. I just care about the results.”
I’ve had more than a few managers/leaders that I’ve seen over the years that proudly stated this frequently. And the thing that was consistent about all of them….
…their teams were typically a complete mess.
One prime example was in Wayfair some years back. The manager i’m thinking of liked to operate at a strategic (high) level… and didn’t like to deal with the details. So he’d align on outcomes that he wanted to see and then leave each team free to use their own processes to get there.
The problem was…. everybody was doing different things and had little insight into what others were doing and how those things were progressing.
Which would be fine if they could all just work in isolation, but there were too many dependencies.
And so it took forever to do anything. Because you’d rely on another team for something, but according to their processes they couldn’t even start helping you for weeks.
The team grew in size to try and overcome this, but this only served to slow things down further.
Tons of resources were wasted. It was by far the most bloated and least effective tech team I have seen in my career. I heard that eventually pretty much the entire tech leadership team there was replaced or left.
For me it was a prime example of what you get when you tell a whole bunch of teams… “Go ahead and do things your way, but just get me results.”
What is the role of a manager?
In my view 80% of your job is process.
You run processes to:
- align on what people are going to work on and make priorities very clear
- get updates and ensure things are on track
- keep folks unblocked and give clear feedback quickly
And then once in awhile…. you are doing some strategic thinking or perhaps trying to resolve a communication issue.
Plus along the way you are developing people. But I would argue that this is a process as well. And a process that is much better achieved by giving constant micro-feedback each day rather than generalizations every few weeks or even months.
This is just the reality as I see it. Think I’m wrong?
A manager that asks their team to ‘just bring me results’ is outsourcing most of their job
Think about it… If I run my team(s) such that all I do is tell everyone what results I want and then wait for them to bring it to me, than why am I needed?
- I am not adding almost any value as a manager.
- I am not in the details enough to give timely feedback or unblock them quickly.
- I do not know the process well enough to be able to help teams work together better.
- I do really know if things are on track or not, but rather just need to base it on trusting them.
In reality I am just hoping and praying that I have an awesome team and that they will ‘figure it out.’
The “Hope and Pray Manager” vs. Me
I like to call a manager that uses the style I refer to above as a “Hope and Pray Manager” because they are only effective if they happen to have great people that consistently go in the right direction.
And to me its kinda like playing craps and hoping to get doubles the whole time.
Let’s see one of these managers put to the test against a team that is run using my “Everything is a task” method. And to make things fair we can assume we have the same goal, the same resources, but just different approaches to management.
The “Hope and Pray Manager” would start off by telling all of his managers what the goals were. And he’d probably conduct a meeting to align on who is going to go for which objectives.
I would also conduct a similar call or meeting to divvy up responsibilities, but the difference being that we’d sit there creating Clickup folders, lists and tasks as we did it.
We’d write out the objectives of each task so that we understood it and assign it to someone. Then we’d align on what priorities to work on first.
Next we’d break up and start working. Each person in my team would be updating their tasks real-time as they made progress or got blocked.
Anyone who was relevant to those tasks, including me, would be following them and get these updates. And if they could help or unblock something they would. Pretty much real-time because we’d all be clearing our notifications frequently.
We’d also sometimes create new tasks on the fly and prioritise those first as we discovered new things.
Meanwhile back at the “Hope and Pray Manager” camp… each person will have broken off trying to achieve their results. There would be little communication between the team members other than perhaps the occasional meeting that someone would set up.
Certain members of the team would surely end up either shooting off in the wrong direction or work in a way that is not aligned to the others.
Meanwhile their manager, the “Hope and Pray Manager” would be twiddling his thumbs waiting for the next meeting and hoping everything would be ok.
Whereas I’d be giving direction and unblocking my team real-time.
Now for the results of the competition
Lets say that we worked in this way for four entire weeks.
During that time the “Hope and Pray Manager” perhaps held meetings 3x per week to align. And they’d probably be 1-2 hours long.
He probably also was answering occasional Slack messages from his team.
With my team, we’d do almost zero team meetings/calls… but rather anyone in the team would be able to buzz me real-time on a Slack Huddle if they wanted to get clarification on something complex. And i’d be available to take those calls because I wasn’t stuck in meetings.
Also everything would be coordinated via the Clickup tasks. There would be hundreds of tasks that were completed with tons of communication on each one among all the relevant stakeholders to those tasks.
These tasks would also be organized in a tree-like structure of spaces/folders/lists so that it was very clear what was being worked on and by who. I’d be tweaking this structure constantly the whole way through.
Now given the two approaches… could the “Hope and Pray Manager” have outperformed my team? This is the question we need to answer.
And this is where I am very confident that I would consistently win. By a large margin.
How to objectively measure who would win?
I like to think of this almost from the perspective of a gambler playing the odds.
How would the gambler look at who was likely to win and how would he calculate these odds?
Well… if both teams were given equal amounts of time and talent… then these would not be differentiators.
Rather he’d need to go to the next level of criteria. And I’m pretty sure he would start measuring things like:
- How clear are the priorities/tasks laid out?
- How quickly do people get feedback and get unblocked?
- How well aware is everyone of the tasks and objectives of the others?
- How much discipline is there to tasks being completed by the due date that is put on them?
And as you look at these KPI’s you should think to yourself… which team would win on these things?
The answer to me is blatantly clear. My team would.
Because the “Everything is a task” system that I use was designed to optimize for these elements.
If there was a system that optimized for those things better… then i’d be using it. Because this is just the way my brain is wired.
What would need to be true for the “Hope and Pray Manager” to beat my system?
For example you might also think that I am missing some criteria in my list above?
Probably I am.
But am I missing something that would go in the favor of the “Hope and Pray Manager? That is the question to ask yourself.
Or in other words… how would he beat me?
Perhaps you think by giving more flexibility to his team he somehow allows them more creativity in their problem-solving approach.
But in my view you would be wrong. I allow teams to have complete flexibility in coming up with new solutions, approaches, etc.
But they need to be transparent about them and get feedback immediately via the Clickup tasks.
So any advantage the “Hope and Pray Manager” has is replicated in my system, but his weaknesses are all exploited. The reality in my view is a simple one…. he has no way of beating me.
Being a “Hope and Pray Manager” is easy…. being a manager using my system is a LOT harder
Pretty much anyone can be a “Hope and Pray Manager.” The formula looks like this:
- You tell HR to get you great people and make sure there is sufficient budget for it
- You put a rigorous interviewing & hiring process to further weed out who are the better ones
- You give them objectives and see how they perform
- You remove the ones that bring less results and bring in more to replace them
This is an easy process. And it is the playbook of the vast majority of managers out there.
But what happens if time or budget doesn’t allow you to bring in the best people?
What if you need to show your results to investors fast to get more funding?
Or perhaps you’re a startup whose runway is running out?
This is where now you’re playing in my arena. One where you are making the absolute most out of the resources and time that is available to you.
And this is the battlefield where I think a lot of these “Hope and Pray Managers” end up being outclassed.
