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.
Ken runs his own agency that helps early stage companies execute faster and cheaper. Check out his linkedin at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenleaver/
Guest Author: Ken Leaver
What I’m about to talk about today is one of the keys that completely changed how I view management. And it completely changed how I have managed for the past ~4 years.
It also gives me what I consider to be a ‘mathematical advantage’ on pretty much anyone who manages the old way.
And to be clear… I cannot think of anyone I have ever worked with my entire 20+ year career the can out-manage me right now. At least not if they use the old way (one-on-one’s etc).
Give us the same resources (ie. people, etc) and the same goal. And I will get to the result more accurately and more efficiently then they will.
Not because I’m smarter. Because in some cases I definitely will not be.
Not because I will work much more. In most cases, I will not.
I’m simply using better systems.
And today I’ll explain my logic as to why I’m pretty confident of this.
My golf metaphor
Now I don’t really play golf. But I have played a couple of times in my life.
And I’ve of course played plenty of mini-golf.
Imagine that you’re targeting a par 4 hole that is about 400 yards away.
And we change the rules such that the traditional manager gets one swing. He needs to get a hole in one.
I, on the other hand, can take twenty swings to get it in.
- So perhaps on the first swing I hit the ball 100 yards forward.
- I go to the ball, hit it another 100 yards forward.
- Then another 100 yards.
- Then another 100.
- And then I take another 15 swings after that, which average 10 yards each.
- Till finally I get it in the hole on my 20th swing.
Yeahhhh!! I won! Hahahahahaha
Whereas my opponent, who may have even been a pretty good golf player, lost!
Why? Because he was only allowed one swing. And while he managed to hit the ball 350 yards…. he still ended up 50 yards short of the hole. lol
Too bad buddy!
This to me is a perfect metaphor of how I manage now vs. the traditional way
Most managers manage via a weekly one-on-one with their direct reports. Usually, they’ll have a regular meeting or at least ask for some type of regular update (eg. an email).
And so they’ll get an update on everything that was done in the past week and align on some priorities for the coming week.
Then the following week they won’t really hear much from their direct report. Unless something urgent popped up that they needed to unblock.
This to me is the equivalent of the golf player who takes one swing and hopes to get a hole in one. The quality of their team member is extremely important.
So they will spend lots of time recruiting the right people (‘A’ players) and forming a strong working relationship with them.
All with the goal that that person can get the ball as close to the hole each week. Because they’re only really taking one shot.
I, on the otherhand, manage as if I’m sitting across the person and said to them… “please hit me with any clarifying question you want all day long. I may not respond immediately but I will respond within an hour.”
And I’ll set the precedent that no question is stupid.
Also everytime they work on something I’ll ask for a short update on what they did so I can give some quick feedback and adjust their direction a bit if needed.
This will also happen all day long on everything they are doing.
And in my system, I don’t really care if the person is more of a ‘B’ player… because I will microsteer them all week long.
And at the end of the week… they will have gotten the ball in the hole. For the simple reason that I’d basically given them twenty swings.
This seems obvious, why don’t managers manage like this already?
Simple. They perceive it as taking too much time and not being worth the effort.
They’re too busy bouncing around to all of their recurring meetings/calls. And because they’re wasting their days in these recurring meetings, they do not have time to microsteer.
Also, I’m using my ‘everything is a task’ system in Clickup. Meaning that:
- Literally everything anyone does is a task that I am following and gettin’ updates on as notifications to my Clickup inbox
- And any work that anyone does is an update to a task
Most managers do not want to bother with all of this. It’s too much detail.
They think to themselves… “I became a manager so I wouldn’t have to deal with these details!” lol
I, on the otherhand, love having access to all these details via my Clickup updates… but I’m rarely spending much time on them.
It takes me 2-3 seconds to read the average Clickup update. And if everything is on track, I clear it without replying or anything.
I can easily clear 40-50 Clickup updates per hour in ~5 minutes and do this pretty much every hour.
Also, I’m not cluttering my brain with all of this information. Rather for me, it’s more like the posts I browse through on my LinkedIn newsfeed or on X.
I’m just browsing through and engaging on the ones that I deem I should engage on.
But wait.. does this really work?
The managers that manage the old way are probably turning bright red right now. They are thinking to themselves… “this guy Ken is completely full of shit. He has no idea what is required to manage in a large organization. He’s just playing around with a bunch of small startups.”
But they would be forgetting that this guy Ken managed the old way for like 20 years, including:
- 7 years in strategy consulting (BCG, Mars & Co) where I worked with lots of corporates.
- 5 years in commercial leadership roles (Visa Inc., Groupon)
- 7 years in senior tech roles (Lazada, Wayfair, Pomelo Fashion)
I know very well what managers need to do in that world.
And I am very confident that it can all be done this new way. Meaning:
- you get rid of almost all the recurring meetings
- you align on strategy as tasks with inputs from the stakeholders
- everything anyone in the org does is a task with the stakeholders as followers
- everyone has to clean their Clickup inbox multiple times a day
- etc.
It’s far from rocket science. And it just works much much better.
There is pretty much nothing that I do now that is the same to how I managed pre-2021. Like truly nothing.
And I consider everything I did pre-2021 to be pretty much garbage.
- Writing useless updates and presentations.
- Having useless recurring meetings with lots of stakeholders who all wanted to sound smart.
- Watching people that do very little get away with it by being politically savvy (I roast people like this now…and enjoy the shit out of it. Because I just start pointing to all the tasks that they didn’t update. hahaha)
I mean this stuff above is a fucking joke.
And if you’re one of those that are still using this stuff… then I’m sorry to bust your bubble.
But it’s time to see that the winds are changing.
And if you’re interested in seeing how some of these concepts can be applied to your org, check out some of the videos on our Taskbeasts YouTube channel.
