paul.bz

Delegation abuse

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 09:53:00 -0500

I was planning to focus this week’s blog post on the dangers of learning from success, but I got some feedback from my earlier post dismissing the overused management act of delegation that I want to discuss.

While delegation certainly has its place at work, my point here is it’s totally abused in business. Believe it or not, it’s possible to be a great leader without delegating everything. The best leaders I’ve interacted with let delegation happen naturally by driving accountability, rewarding success, and consistently trimming fat. When it’s clear to a good employee they’re on the hook to make something happen, they’ll get it done and they’ll ask you to send anything their way that’s relevant, without you having to delegate to them. A leader might get stuck feeling like they’re overwhelmed with work, needing to pass tasks off to their minions, but that’s a signal of a different problem. Either your entire organization is overworked, you’re not effectively driving accountability, or you’re allowing your team to delegate up (which is just as bad).

If you feel like you’re stuck in this trap, here are a few strategies I’ve seen work well -

Regroup: If your business is growing fast, it’s likely your setup from last year, month, week is no longer adequate. The bad news is if you don’t figure it out, not only will you be one of these unfortunate leaders we all complain about, but you’ll also be a bottleneck for your team. This is why so many small organizations have a hard time scaling up. They assume they need to start training leaders how to delegate, but that’s exactly the wrong thing to do. It takes time and may feel like a waste, but it’s worth putting in the time to rethink your team setup. You might think about resizing the team or clarifying individual responsibilities.
Reflect: There’s a possibility you’re no longer the right guy/gal for the job. Your group may have scaled up beyond your means as a leader, or shrunk to the point that you’re expected to be more of a subject matter expert (for which, you may no longer be qualified). In both cases it’s easy to see how you might settle into a role delegating versus doing. Do yourself and your team a favor and get out of the way, find a new role or retrain yourself to be a more effective individual contributor.
Address deficiencies: This one makes my skin crawl, but it happens a lot. Part of your organization is terribly ineffective and lazy. Another part of your organization takes on every task you put in front of them and consistently deliver without asking questions. To compensate for your weak group, you delegate their responsibilities to a high performing group. There are so many obvious reasons this is the wrong thing to do. This is classic organizational fat in need of trimming.

I’m sure there are many other approaches you can take to help, but my suggestion is to try something. Delegation has a role in business, but it should happen organically if your team is properly designed. Don’t just assume it’s a natural part of becoming a more effective leader of a growing organization. Its much more a symptom of a problem than anything else..

Velocity trumps magnitude

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 13:05:58 -0500

A few nights ago I caught up with a friend / investor / technology executive traveling through NYC.

We had a great chat about business and the merits of building something truly huge (home run) versus a series of well executed, but smaller businesses / projects / deals (doubles or triples). It’s hard for most of us to get excited about building something small, but we all realize there are factors beyond our control when a business breaks out and becomes truly huge.

He made the point that when he invests in a person or a company, he goes for the group that favors getting things done and has a history of doing so. This statement really caused me to reflect because I think most of us aim to build something big. It wasn’t until this conversation that I realized the two can go hand in hand.

While you can aspire to build a business the size of Google, Microsoft or Facebook, there are just too many variables out of your control. You can obviously assess market opportunity and inspect revenues of the companies you aim to disrupt, but even the most thoughtful business plans require a significant amount of luck to change an industry. What is much more realistic to plan for area building a series of successful businesses that solve a concrete problem. In the process of building your more modest business, it’s possible luck and other variables will fall your way and it can turn big. The point is you don’t give up the possibility of building a huge business while working on your perfectly executed, yet slightly smaller idea.

My takeaway from this is to think about the tradeoff of velocity vs magnitude. The more I think about it, velocity tends to trump magnitude aside from a few outliers (which, ironically are the businesses we all tend to obsess about).

Details matter

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:45:39 -0500

When I first started managing a team, I was advised to become effective at delegating, removing myself from the details, and to not take on too many problems directly so that I can scale. It was something I never felt comfortable with and I didn’t necessarily aspire to “be” the people giving me this advice. So, I started observing what other managers around me were doing. I was surprised to see entire layers of “successful” middle managers do little more than handle basic administrative and people-management overhead. They contributed little if anything to the product or it’s sales.

As I started getting more senior at Microsoft, I noticed something even more interesting about leaders at the very top of the organization - they had a deeper understanding of detail then managers two or three levels beneath them. What was more impressive is they carried that detail across multiple business units.

My conclusion (and opinion), is the link between successful senior leaders and attention to detail is actually more about causality than anything else. It’s not that the senior leaders I worked with were smart (they were), but they are actually at the top because they understand the detail. Great team members are the same - they understand in detail what’s going on around them, can spot opportunities that others don’t, and therefore become tremendously successful in their job.

The lesson I took away from observing and reflecting on this space is it pays to understand the details of your business or product, no matter how junior or senior you are. Contrary to the advice I was given early on, aspiring leaders should immerse themselves in the detail. Study all the detail you can find until the sea of data starts to make sense. It will give you clarity about your business that makes being a leader so much more productive and satisfying. Don’t get lazy and don’t ever say you don’t need to understand a product or business. You’re never too busy or too important to distance yourself from your business.

Don't do this in business

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 09:39:32 -0500

I started making money in tech by hacking game consoles and building custom websites when I was in junior high school. When I got to college, I started a software development company with one of my good friends. We left college a year later to focus on building the business up. As we grew, we merged with another business and before we knew it were selling software to some of the biggest companies in the country. By 19, I thought I knew everything about business - build good software at the right price and you’ll keeping growing. Turns out, it doesn’t work that way (although I was right that product and price are key), and while there are often a whole set of variables outside of your control - there’s a lot you can do to increase the chances your business will take off.

After we wound down the startup, I knew I had a lot to learn about business and I didn’t have the stomach at the time to try again. It was hard having to lay off staff at the age of 21 because I didn’t know how to properly forecast, partner, market and sell. So, I went back to school and finished my engineering degree, joined Microsoft to learn a bit more, and got a non-traditional MBA from a great school in Europe (I’m passionate about international markets). A few years later than planned, I’m back in the startup world running - of all things - the business side of a great startup in NYC called Aviary.

Now that I’m back, looming over my head is all the bad, unproductive, wasteful things I learned in both the startup and the corporate world. I know it sounds a big negative, but having a sense of what NOT to do feels just as important as knowing what to do.

Thankfully, I kept some pretty good notes along the way, so this blog will be more about me digitizing my notes than writing for an audience. In doing so, I’ll attempt to identify the stuff I think we should do more of, the stuff we should never do, and everything in between. I’ll be honest and direct, using real examples where possible, but won’t reveal anything confidential about my current or previous employers, managers, employees, customers or partners.

I’ve come up with about 20 topics I plan to start with, and hoping to post once a week. Let’s see how this goes.

Harry’s first day working at Aviary

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 10:15:00 -0500

Harry’s first day working at Aviary