Effectiveness of Not Micromanaging
The title is somewhat misleading, but not micromanaging has many positive effects.
Since winter break was around the corner, aquarc's development has been slow, in terms of both the tangible product and the team internally.
While I was on vacation, I decided to close out my phone for a week and read books. I learned a lot. In fact, I've started reading books regularly again to complement my practice.
As a quick recap, here's what I read: 1. Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter 2. The Mom Test 3. The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team 4. Leading from Anywhere
While all these books are equally important, I find the 5 dysfunctions to be a solid indicator of progress within the team. Since I started cutting out my omnipotent influence, things have taken a turn for the better.
The week right after I got back, I spent several hours each day interviewing people and analyzing what they say. I asked them questions about their team management and motivation. For the most part I got grounded in reality that people were here to advance their careers. Although I can't say I did the best job, I definitely understood what people needed and I tried to give them tools for their success. Initially there was little progress, but things looked brighter by the day once my co-workers felt their voices were heard.
After my first aquarc team meeting post-break, it felt like I had wasted 2 hours and got virtually nothing accomplished, which was definitely not true. During that meeting I decided to speak less and let the team take the show. I let a co-worker interview people individually instead of completing my agenda, even though I had planned an agenda with debates and released it beforehand. After we started to make progress on my agenda, I realized my co-workers still viewed me as an "authority" they had to listen to and got off track or quiet pretty easily. Being a "debate-maker" was the first step I had to make to build any sort of communication. We played team-bonding games and those were funny and brought the team closer together, but I've learned high schoolers like nothing more than being able to voice their opinions. After all, isn't this our age of rebellion?
As the debates quickly turned into interesting-but-casual conversations, I knew I had to build some sort of responsibility on the part of everyone because I could not enforce "staying on topic" by myself. That's where the idea of being an "Investor" (Multipliers) came in— I started taking away from my absolutist-ish power and giving it to people. Although little was accomplished the week after the meeting, I was able to sit back and watch as my team lead the next meeting. All I did was share my insights when prompted by the rest of the team; to me this lack of activity was an indicator of success. People felt like they had to take responsibility; although it was slow, my team had eliminated the lack of conflict and accountability dysfunctions.
Last week I decided to experiment with building a hierarchy. After looking at some articles online, it was pretty apparent that I missed the importance of well-defined roles. I didn't want to give people roles like "Director" or "Human Resources Assistant" that would define them, but rather a slightly tighter hierarchy that would decentralize aquarc a little bit. I liked the idea of having a well defined marketing team and tech team, but now I understand that those have to be intertwined as well for this startup to be effective. After thinking about the hierarchy and discussing it with people on my team, I decided to pursue two roles: CMO and CTO. Since the tech team was barely functional, I decided to nominate one of my team members to CMO immediately so she could focus on building autonomy while we would have a competition for CTO.
The CTO competition involved a short Google Form where the applicant would describe their self-motivation and team building skills. Then I decided to have a "CTO of the week" where the applicant would lead the company. I decided to nominate two people to lead during difficult times for them. So far, it's been working pretty great. I've just been advising the applicants on how to improve their leadership skills and recommending books. Now I can turn my focus to more research and innovation.
Or at least, that's what I thought. Once I saw the aquarc website's commit graph, my jaw literally dropped. I made the lack of commits very transparent to everyone and upon suggestion from several team members, started "laying off" people who were hurting the tight nature of the group by not making time for aquarc. At least now that the internals have improved, there should be some progress on the outside.
Future Direction
The biggest Dysfunction to overcome right now is commitment. People aren't able to make well defined ones, but when they are they're generally accountable about it. A CTO applicant recommended the "3 Strikes, You're Out" policy in the form of missed deadlines, which pretty much everyone was on board with. Who's making deadlines for themselves now?
On the surface, it seemed as if school was eating all their time. I thought about building a note-sharing program so aquarc could spend less time on school internally. But it seemed like I was missing something else.
Although I tried to avoid it because of the harsh reality it seemed it was going to present to me, I'm currently reading Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. To put it simply, I don't think I've ever understood how limited I was before this book. I'm currently trying to apply techniques like a fixed upper limit on tasks and feeling "Joy of Missing Out" to combat some of my own experiences. Once I get through the book and find some small successes with my own time management, I should be able to clear some frustration from my team members. Applying this knowledge is the strongest support I can give my team right now, especially since (mostly) everyone's in high school.
I can also become better at utilizing talent. Right now I feel insecure if I transfer opportunities to people on my team and they leave, but Multipliers' "talent magnet" effect is already happening; motivated people with a strong background are waitlisted to enter aquarc, and people are growing as they're working with me. I've started to realize there's no harm in letting people grow beyond me and accomplish more.
In the upcoming week, I'll most likely be focusing on calling people again and understanding their trouble with time management. Motivation is important, but time management is the crux of the problem. Whatever uncanny solution there is, I'll have to work hard to uncover it!
Tags: leadership, self-reflection, waste-of-time