Why Does Your Team Think You're a Worse Manager Than You Do? - 9/17

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📰 Today's Edition: Why Does Your Team Think You're a Worse Manager Than You Do?

You think you're doing a great job managing your team. But your team disagrees.

This gap shows up in almost every startup I look at, and founders are usually the last to find out about it. The feedback usually arrives in the form of a resignation email from your best engineer, six weeks after you could have done anything about it.

Imagine leading a team to build a plane while the plane is already in the sky and falling. You have no directions. You don't know where you're going. And you still have to articulate a destination to everyone on board and look like you know what you're doing.

That's startup management.

Does pivoting break your team?

You may have to pivot. That's fine and often the correct decision.

But your team is going to feel whiplash. From where they sit, there's constantly something new to do and no visible through line. Worse, they watch work they poured months into get thrown out.

The fix is communication, but it's not "communicate more." You have to tell your team explicitly that you're running a series of experiments. Tell them that the point of the work is the learning, and that the learning gets used even if the product shuts down.

People can handle their work being killed, but it has to have a point. 

Who is the entrepreneur?

So many startup managers expect their reports to take initiative, operate with full autonomy, and figure it out all while fitting into the company’s mission and directives. 

So even if you have entrepreneurial employees, they still need direction and guidance on the scope of their projects.

Founders often set unreasonable expectations that their employees will take initiative and then get frustrated when the initiative-taking doesn’t “fit” what they want. Clearly scoped and communicated expectations solve most of this.

When did you last praise anyone?

Working in your chaotic org is hard. No offense.

Your team needs praise for a job well done, including when the work has to get thrown out because you pivoted or because you haven't found the right answer yet. Especially then. When they have given it their all and it has gone nowhere, it is not their fault.

Praise costs you nothing and it's so important for morale. I have a magical horn, and even I can't conjure enthusiasm out of a team that hasn't heard "good work" in weeks.

Is your brainstorm actually an order?

As the CEO, sometimes, half-thinking out loud in a meeting you say things like, "What if we did this?"

You meant nothing by it. But your team heard a mandate.

Teams listen to management and take what they say seriously, which is the correct instinct and also the source of enormous wasted effort. Two people may spend a week on your idle thought only for you to say later “oh, I didn’t fully think we’d do that now.”

The fix is to label things out loud. Say "I'm brainstorming and this is not a priority" or say "I want this done by Friday." Both are fine. Ambiguity is not your friend.

Are you hiring and firing on the right timeline?

You've heard this one before, so I'll keep it short. Hire carefully for both skills and culture. Then fire fast when it isn't working, which most founders don't do because losing talent feels painful and you're already short-handed. This is especially hard when someone was good at first or decent at first and then all of a sudden can no longer do the job or the next job.

The wrong person sitting in your company too long affects everybody's morale. Your team notices before you do, and they're watching to see how long you tolerate it.

How many priorities do you actually have?

In a startup there are only so many things you can be doing at once.

CEOs routinely want their team taking on a list of projects that no team that size could reasonably deliver. What you get back is burnout and a pile of half-finished work.

If you have seven priorities, you have zero priorities. Focus is the game.

Do your people know what success is?

Most startups have no clear measurable goals for either personal success or company success.

Your team wants to grow with your startup. That's why they took the job over the boring one that paid more. But they need to understand what goals they have to hit to progress here. Otherwise growth feels arbitrary, and arbitrary growth feels like favoritism.

Write down what success looks like for the company this quarter. Write down what success looks like for each person. Neither document needs to be fancy. One of the problems here is that in the beginning you don’t actually know what goals are reasonable. So maybe the goal is simply to do specific things. At a certain point when you have a product and a good idea of your ideal customer persona then at that point, it makes sense to have revenue goals. But in the beginning, it is OK to have very specific goals like call 50 people of this customer persona and learn all their problems. As opposed to make $1 million by next week.

But as a purple flying hippocorn, what do I know?

Until next time,

Dunky, the "management guru" hippocorn

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