How old is the team you’re leading?

Growing up as leaders

In my previous post, I wrote about how the way work used to work was (and still is) conducive to people remaining perpetual children. How someone else, higher in the hierarchy, shaped our work environment and made all the decisions for us. This someone else watched, surveilled and scolded us if we were out of line.

So… we didn't grow up, and the impact of that is deeper and broader than we usually realize.

Now, let’s talk about the flip side: growing up as leaders, encouraging and nurturing our teams to be healthy, autonomous adults, and treating them as such.

I once ran a company in the event management & training industry.

There was one person on the team I didn’t need to ever worry about. Our finance manager. Rain or shine, she’d be doing her job and tell me right away if something was wrong or needed my attention. But everyone else needed to be told what to do, when to do it, when to show up, when they were done, they needed their work checked (even minor tasks) and so on.

Why?

Well, they were all junior… most of them were raised in a culture that doesn’t encourage a lot of responsibility early on… yadda yadda yadda. All good excuses.

But the truth is that it’s very likely they needed that level of micro-management because I’d picked and nurtured them so.

A decade later, I now have an “operating mode” that, most of the time, ensures everyone in my team(s) is highly encouraged to ‘adult’ at work. I still stumble, and that’s ok. But I’ve learned enough to now lead 5-7 independent teams working with 10-15 B2B clients, 200+ B2C clients and 10+ ongoing projects with startups, entrepreneurs and remote workers in Bali as well as across a dozen other countries.

A part of my team coworking on the rooftop at Livit Hub Bali.

So here are a few things I’ve learned in the process (the hard way):

1. Provide context, alignment & tell the truth

Some of the biggest failures (read: learning moments) I’ve had as a leader were a direct result of not sharing enough information. The Netflix culture deck seems to agree, they say: “When one of your talented employees does something dumb, don’t blame them. Instead, ask yourself what context you failed to set.”

Example:

Are you going for excellence (and not only trying to pay the bills and make ends meet with your business?) Spell that out explicitly and show with clear examples, templates and plenty of details what that looks like.

Nothing good ever happens if your teams aren’t clear on the strategy, the goals and what’s expected.

Also, tell people the truth.

You’ve hopefully hired capable people. Share open updates and feedback on how they’re doing, how the company’s doing, where you’re stuck as a team, what worked and what didn’t, and how you’re doing as a leader. So they can help you and do more problem-solving on their own and, in time, do it well, too.

2. Decentralize decision-making & minimize policies

Once you’ve set the context and have alignment on the goals and strategy, it’s time to build further towards “adult-ing at work”.

Encourage and trust people to self-manage as much as possible: for example, pick and approve their own holidays; decide how, where and when to do their work.

Patrick Campbell, who bootstrapped and sold Profitwell for $200M and hired hundreds of people, has some great advice on this.

“You hire specialists and hopefully pay them accordingly. They think about a problem 100x more than you; then you barge in and make a decision, because you know better? Not the best idea.

What matters is: are they getting results? Are they doing well?”"

An example from my team: we were recently working on our new pricing for our coworking services at Livit Hub Bali, and the scenario/proposal that was best and that we ended up going with came from one of our front-desk champions. Not a leader, not a senior. But someone who speaks to our clients every day.

3. Graduate from micro-managing

I previously wrote at length about this here. In short, the biggest problem with micromanaging is that it’s a vicious cycle, a self-fulfilling prophecy:

If you tell people to do precisely this and not do that other thing all the time, you lose top performers. High performers want the ball. Give it to them, and give them room to succeed and fail. When team members are new or junior, make decisions smaller, build the “muscle” and then allow for progressively bigger decisions.

I’ve worked and managed remotely or in hybrid environments for 10+ years now (since before it was cool); and over the span of this decade, I rarely got to work with people who didn't do enough. And when they weren’t doing enough, it was generally easy to spot it and let them go. The type I more frequently collaborate with tends to overwork. Which segways us into…

4. Allow (and teach) your team to disconnect and… relax

We all know that if you enjoy what you do (ikigai, anyone?), there's a temptation to work too much. And with boundaries blurred due to the pandemic and unhealthy, emergency remote work environments, that’s happened quite a bit over the last years.

So instead of micro-managing, prioritize educating your team on how to:

prioritize when there's too much on their plate
stay focused on what matters when things get hectic
but also how to gauge their energy levels, as well as unwind, disconnect & recharge.

Wait, I need to nudge my team to relax?

Yes, you probably do. And it's important to have these conversations frequently & honestly. Thank me later, when you've avoided a few burnouts yourself, crazy high attrition rates in your team and your company survived the great resignation.

(this advice is obviously for teams who are playing the long game, not for a 2-month-old startup in full ideation mode)

5. Servant leadership

When someone is reporting to you, you’re serving them.

Align the strategy, the goals and the plan, then let people do the job you’re paying them for. And be there when they need you (not every other minute of their day). That’s how trust works - and it’s the only way to ensure consistent, team-wide high performance.

Conclusion

It’s important to remember, just like at an individual level, that our brains (especially as leaders), don’t optimize for happiness and well-being. They optimize for survival, and often those are very different things. Most of the time, survival means taking the familiar path.

Our brains are programmed to continue or do again and again whatever it’s “worked” or simply kept us alive/going.

If you’ve had a pattern of controlling every little thing your employees do, of paying attention to who’s online and when, who comes in early at the office and leaves last, of never trusting them and taking every little decision yourself, that’s what your brain will still want to do - by default.

The only way forward is breaking the cycle… and growing into a leader of healthy, responsible adults. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it.

I promise you, you and your team will get more done AND be happier.