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
I’ve worked for a number of different managers/leaders over my 20-year career, which has spanned strategy consulting (7 years), commercial leadership roles (5 years) and tech leadership roles (7 years).
And I was reflecting yesterday on who I respected and learned the most from. And who I felt like I learned the least from.
I found that one thread that ran through all the managers that I learned the most from was their orientation towards doing things themselves and getting their hands dirty. They had done the job themselves, knew the details, and could unblock me when I was stuck because they actually knew what to do.
The thing that was consistent among all my past managers that I did not like and learned the least from… was an orientation towards just talking.
They often viewed ‘management’ as sitting through meetings all day and giving verbal feedback. I also found these managers to have consistently brought the least results and created the most dysfunctional teams.
Now let me explain why.
I am not fan of what I call ‘traditional’ managers
Let me start by defining what a traditional manager is. For me a traditional manager is a person that manages by talking and giving verbal feedback.
Oftentimes they will have a packed schedule of meetings each day, some of which are cross-functional meetings and some of which are more internal team meetings.
With their direct reports they will often use regular one-on-ones. During which they will often expect some type of update, which they then provide feedback on.
I, myself, am guilty of managing this way for almost two decades. And I now consider what I used to do…. to be extremely inefficient.
Why? Because you’d give feedback and then typically hope that the person:
a) did not ignore or forget some of the points you made
b) understood you correctly
c) prioritised it against all of their other tasks appropriately
d) progressed things at the pace you expected
The percentage of times in which a person I managed correctly did a+b+c+d and came to the next one-on-one having rocked it… was like <5% of the time. If that
The way I manage now = No meetings, everything is a task
Now I don’t have regular meetings… actually I don’t have almost any meetings. No regular one-on-ones and no team meetings.
Which means my team can grab me anytime if it’s something urgent or complex that they wanna chat about. Because my calendar is clear of all these regular meetings.
Rather than meetings… everything is a task in Clickup. We even do brainstorming on topics as tasks, which I find to typically be far more effective and democratic than a meeting.
I also follow and comment on these tasks that are being managed by my team very quickly (typically within 2-3 hours since I keep my notifications clean).
There is nothing that someone does which is not a task in Clickup. For me, if its not in Clickup.. it simply doesn’t exist.
I won’t go into a lot of detail about my method now as I’ve discussed it in numerous posts in the past… but essentially you’ve got the gist of it.
Right now on various projects I have somewhere around 30 people doing a mix of marketing, development, content, analytics, etc. I manage them all direct. No extra layers of management.
In the past I’ve managed even as much as 50-60 folks direct when I was running three client projects and my own startup. And i’m pretty confident I could get this as high as 100 if I wanted… while still not killing myself.
Oh and if you’re thinking that I’m the bottleneck to lots of stuff because I’m managing so many folks.. you’d be wrong.
On pretty much any of my past client engagements… if you were to look at who was the most responsive person, whether it be on Clickup/Slack/email, the answer would almost always have been me. Because I clear everything every few hours.
People get a clear response from me quickly. All the time. Period. It’s just my method.
The way I manage now blows out the traditional way
Let’s get back to my equation above…you know the one where the % of folks that did a+b+c+d correctly was <5%.
If I were to take an average now with my new way of managing…that percentage is probably up around 95%. Pretty consistently.
Why? Because for literally everything anyone does… there is a task that is created with a very clear context and goal. And there is also a priority, assignee and a due date.
I try to remove ambiguity completely. And nothing gets forgotten.
Also, we have a rule that any work that is done gets reflected as a comment on the task. No comment = I assume no work was done. Simple.
And they can tag me for input anytime. So they’re getting my input on the work they are doing as frequent as every few hours all week long. Now compare that to the manager who gets a single weekly update from their direct report.
Am I going to get a better result? Of course.
And the end result speaks for itself. Going from 5% to 95% is a 19x improvement!!
If you work this way and get it down with your team… it is transformative. I guarantee it.
A manager that prefers ‘talking’ to ‘doing’ will often hate my system
Some traditional managers will adopt my system and love it. They see the value, see that they get things done much faster, and it will just click.
Others who prefer to talk and not systematically create and update tasks.. will hate it. Particularly if they rely on being persuasive…. because their verbal persuasion skills are rendered useless.
These are also typically the folks who are less structured and less prone to get into the details.
So in a way the system self-selects for people that like getting their hands dirty and like structure. ie. my preferred style of manager.
But can a traditional manager beat me?
Well, let me first set a caveat. My approach helps you execute faster and cheaper. But you still need to be doing the right thing.
It’s as Warren Buffet was famous for saying in this quote below.
So my approach will not ensure that you have the right strategy. If that was the case… I’d be a billionaire. Hahaha
But if you gave me and a traditional manager the same goal and same resources… I think I would absolutely murder them. In fact I’d put money on it.
I am trying to get you to think differently about HOW you execute
For those of you that have read Alex Hormozi’s book, $100M Offers, I think there are a lot of parallels.
This book gives you the tools to a highly effective way of thinking about how to create an offer that sells itself. I love its concepts and it has really gotten me to think in a different way about my own business.
And in my view… my approach that I describe above does something very similar for ‘executing’. It’s just a shit-ton better than the old way. 🙂
Wanna try this in your team?
I am testing offering this as a service and will take on a maximum of two concurrent clients. And after doing this for over three years with numerous clients and my own startups… I’m so confident that it works, I am going to guarantee it.
Meaning we align upfront on the targeted results (eg. headcount reduction, cost savings, more output per team member, speed of execution, etc.) and if your team puts in the work, but doesn’t achieve the targeted results… I pay everything back.
If you’re interested in a discovery call to see if your team is a good fit for this… you can book a call here: https://calendly.com/kenny516/30min
