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
So in my last post 10x How You Execute I laid out a lot of the basic framework for how I manage vs. how a traditional manager manages. And how I use tasks to reflect everything that is being done in the team.
Additionally I explained how I maintain discipline on these tasks so that all work that is done is reflected as comments and things like the task status and due date are always maintained updated.
Today I wanted to go deeper on how you actually manage and give feedback to the individuals in your team, as it’s key to how you kick the butts of the ‘old school’ managers.
First… laying the foundation
There are certain things that need to be happening for what I explain in the next section to be effective. So I like to call it the ‘foundation’ and it consists of each of these tenets being true:
- each team member has clearly written tasks for their work
- it is very clear what tasks are prioritised for them to work on
- any task that is prioritised has a due date
- they are commenting each time they either get stuck or make progress
If you have gotten all these things correct… then you, as their manager, should be responding to their comments within 2-3 hours because you are keeping your own notifications clean.
Now i’ll go deeper into how you do this and why you do this.
How do you respond within a few hours even if you have 20 – 40 direct reports?
Well… the most important thing is that you NEED TO KEEP YOUR CALENDAR EMPTY. If your calendar is full of recurring meetings.. there is no way to make this work.
By keeping my calendar empty… I am typically clearing Slack notifications every 20-30 minutes. And I am responding to Clickup notifications every 1-2 hours.
When you do this consistently over a period of time.. your team gets accustomed to the fact that…
“If I get blocked.. I have a very easy way of getting unblocked very quickly. I can either comment on Clickup or Slack… and Ken will unblock me.”
And that confidence… is absolutely key to the system working.
The minute they think… “hmmm if I comment.. then perhaps my manager will respond only tomorrow or the next day. Or perhaps they will forget to respond at all.” This completely blows the system apart and you WILL NOT operate your team like a jetski.
In the traditional world where teams work physically together in the same office they can try to achieve something similar by just walking up to one another.
I operated like that for many years… and in comparison to what I do now I consider it complete crap. Why?
Well… if I have 20-40 direct reports and they’re all just coming up to me and interrupting me anytime they please.. I am going to be one highly inefficient (and probably annoyed) mofo.
So rather in my system.. i work in cycles clearing out these notifications throughout the day, and can get into a highly efficient flow state where I clear 50-60 of them in just 10 minutes or so.
So this then brings you to the next problem…. how do you keep your calendar empty?
I mean…. all of those recurring meetings are probably adding some value to your organisation, otherwise you wouldn’t be having them. Right?
And if you just axe them… you lose that value.
So you cannot just axe them… you need to replace them.
But how?
I recommend thinking about what is covered in each of those meetings.. and then thinking about how you can instead reflect that as tasks that everyone then comments on asynchronously.
Having done this process lots of times over the past few years.. I can tell you that it is 100% possible.
So basically go through each and every recurring meeting on your calendar… and figure out how to exterminate it.
In some cases you will need buy-in from other teams or your boss. And that is very hard to get. Which is why to do this correctly you need your entire company to adopt this methodology.
Or better yet… you start the company from the outset using this methodology.
In this system a manager is only as good as how responsive they are
If you’ve digested what I wrote above… than you’ve understood that everything rides on responsiveness. Because:
- your team needs to trust that if they comment when they get blocked, they’ll get a fast response
- and without that trust they will stop commenting in the first place
- and then the whole system breaks down
It is a bit like the old Japanese (Toyota) system of the Andon cord in which if someone on the production like pulled the cord.. than the whole process stopped till it was fixed.
Now would that process work if the team that comes to fix the problem only comes in a day or two?
No. Fast response is key. Just as it is in my system.
I’ve consistently found that managers who are slow to respond suck
I’ve met numerous managers of large teams in the past who would pick and choose who to respond to. Or perhaps they would be very slow to respond.
And if I went to their computer they’d often have a big mess of emails and Slack notifications that haven’t been cleared.
The managers that operated in this way almost ALWAYS had quite dysfunctional and political teams.
Let’s break down why…
- They pick and choose what they consider to be the highest priorities, and this is what they respond to. So you need to curry favor with them, which tends to lead to politics.
- This then results in everything that they don’t deem a priority to be held up by them.
- This then has lots of trickle down effects where lots of projects are impacted and get delayed. Then the resources on those delayed projects are used at a fraction of their capacity and tons of money is wasted.
Do a careful analysis of a senior manager that is highly disorganized and I bet he is secretly costing the organization many thousands (or even millions) of dollars in trickle down effects.
I’ve also seen some examples of what happens to an organization at scale when many managers/teams operate like this.
And that is what I call the ‘Titanic’, ie. things move extremely slow and there are delayed projects due to bottlenecks everywhere.
Wrapping up… How you operate like a Jetski?
Jetskis are fast and agile. You can switch direction fast. You can accelerate or decelerate.
The ‘Titanic’ is slow. It takes a long time to change directions or speed.
And in my experience…. to be successful in today’s cutthroat business world… your team needs to be as close to the jetski as possible.
If you do the things I say above correctly…. then based on my experience your team will be faster and more agile than probably 95%+ of teams out there.
And that means… that you beat your competition. Or perhaps it’s the difference between survival and getting laid off in an economic climate like we see today.
Or.. just ignore all this and operate like the Titanic.
And hope that someone like me isn’t doing circles around you with our jetski 😉
