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
How many times have you seen a senior manager enter a new company and not long after he brings a lot of his own people into the company with him?
It happens a lot. Especially for very senior roles.
And a lot of times these people he or she brings in end up replacing people that are already in the company.
Why does it happen? Is it because the folks that were in his ‘inherited team’ in the company suck?
Sometimes… but my experience is that that is usually not the case.
Rather it is that this new senior manager often needs to deliver results quickly and needs a team he can trust fast.
He often doesnt’t have time to test folks out and hope that they are the right ones.
Because if they aren’t then he spends months looking for a replacement… and he might not even have that long before being replaced himself.
So due to this lack of trust he will find a way to bring in his ‘own people’ and wipe out a large swath of the existing team.
And given the systems that this manager relies on… this honestly makes a lot of sense. He is giving himself his best chance to be successful.
But what if he had systems that didn’t rely on this type of behavior? That allowed him to vet and train people very quickly?
Then in my view he wouldn’t need to rely on bringing in a lot of his own people.
Now let’s roll it back and give some more context.
I use a system that ‘micromanages’ people at scale and I view that as a very good thing
I’ve talked about my system a lot in the past so I won’t go into all of the details. But the high level story is that:
- Anything that someone does which takes more than 20 minutes is reflected as a Clickup task. If there is no task it should not be done. It does not exist to me.
- All tasks have an assignee, a status, comment updates and a due date (if it is started).
- Any work that is done should be reflected as an update to a task (eg. status change, comment, etc.)
- Everyone in the team needs to clear all Clickup notifications every couple of hours (which results in extreme responsiveness)
- There are no recurring meetings. But they can do quick impromptu calls when they need to. And since nobody is in recurring meetings there is no excuse for the other person not being available immediately to help unblock them.
I’ve used this system for over three years now. I’ve helped start several companies with it, I’ve run a number of side hustles, and have implemented variations of it in a number of larger organizations.
I love it.
For me it is the milestone equivalent of B.C. vs. A.D. for my career.
And Ken after he did this shit is probably like 2-3x more productive than before.
I just get a SHITLOAD more done.
And I am pretty positive that anyone that uses this system correctly would say the same.
With this system I do not rely on using people I ‘trust’
I have done many projects in the past few years where I hired freelance contractors that i’d never worked with before. And anyway needed to be able to deliver results quickly.
But I found that the system enabled this quite well.
I could hire freelancers from Upwork and very quickly see if they were competent. And often I would hire 2-3 for a short scope of work with the goal of just keeping the best one.
I no longer needed to rely on bringing in people I had already worked with before. Because I could ‘tune’ people on the fly.
Meaning that I’d give them tasks… they would update those tasks… and I would give very rapid and frequent feedback.
Very quickly I had a pretty good idea of their capability set and whether they were competent. If they were not competent I cut them loose quickly. Often within a week of hiring them via Upwork.
Could I have done this with the old way I used to work?
Answer: Hell No!
Because I typically would give everyone 1-2 weeks to onboard and then perhaps i’d have a 1-on-1 with them every week.
It would often take several months for me to see if they were truly competent.
Several months (old Ken) vs. several days (new Ken)….
…drumroll….
New Ken wins! lol
Let’s do a case study of ‘traditional trust-based’ approach vs. my approach
I was contracting in Russia in mid-2018 for a company called Ozon, a top two eCommerce player in the country. A new CEO had been brought in the year before by the name of Alex.
He was a pretty aggressive dude and knew what he was looking for out of his newly inherited team.
A year later I think about 90% of the senior management team had been replaced. Over 20 people were fired or forced out… and Alex brought in new people to replace them.
Why? Because in his view they didn’t fit his bill.
Were the new managers that he brought in much better? Doubtful.
So what did these old managers likely do wrong? I can tell you from experience….
- sometimes they probably misunderstood what was expected of them
- they shot off in the wrong direction because they had relatively infrequent feedback
- their personality/style perhaps did not mesh well with Alex’s
But most of them quite honestly were trying to save their own job… so with a bit more direction and feedback could they have succeeded?
I know some of them personally… and know the answer to that question is yes.
What would this situation have looked like using my approach?
Well, first off…. we’d take everything that each manager was doing and break it down into a tree-like structure of folders & tasks in Clickup. Kinda like the example I put above of one of the hustles i’m working on.
We’d make sure that there was a task for each of their responsibilities and that each task was written with a clear ‘definition of done’. So that they knew what good looked like.
Then their manager, ‘Alex’ in this case, would follow all of these tasks and respond to comments that were made. He’d clarify whether they were moving in the right direction, whether the output was of sufficient quality, etc.
In the meantime, he’d wipe his calendar pretty much clean of all recurring meetings so that he had sufficient time to do this.
Pretty soon he’d get to know who was good, who was not good, who could be improved quickly. And so he’d only prune out the people who weren’t good and couldn’t be improved quickly.
End result?
- A lot more managers in the old team save their jobs
- Company saves a lot of time & money that would have been wasted in replacing them
- Alex still shows the results he needs. Perhaps even better results.
Do I think the situation above is farfetched??
No. I’ve achieved smaller versions of this multiple times already
If more managers work like this… I honestly think it would be a very GOOD thing for the world
Think about what i’ve said above… I’m basically saying that new managers will not rely nearly as much on bringing their ‘own people’ with them.
This means a lot less layoffs.
Because let’s be honest…. new managers coming in and wiping out much of the preceding team HAPPENS ALL THE TIME.
And i’m saying it doesn’t have to.
But…. it does require managers taking a different approach.
One that requires them to be much more ‘in the details’ and responsive.
Let’s create a better world! 🙂
