My 16 Rules for Managing a Small Team

Summary

In this insightful talk, Layla from ProcessDriven shares her 16 rules for managing a small team. While delegation and management come with their challenges, Layla emphasizes the importance of effort and servant leadership. Her rules originate from personal experiences, offering practical advice on how to foster productive and supportive team environments. From avoiding excessive autonomy to the significance of balanced feedback and personalized communication, these guidelines reflect Layla's journey in leadership and her commitment to effective team management through process-driven approaches.

Highlights

• Rethinking delegation: It's an inverse triangle where leaders support their team from the bottom up. 🔄
• Effort, not gravity, is essential in effective delegation and management. 💪
• Meetings, especially in remote teams, are vital for culture, if done with value. 📅
• Autonomy isn't always the answer; adapt your delegation style to fit team members. 🤝
• Transparency is key, except in certain personnel-related scenarios. 🔍
• Balance negative feedback with positive inputs to foster growth. 📈

Key Takeaways

• Servant leadership flips traditional delegation models upside down, emphasizing support rather than top-down tasking. 🔄
• Relying solely on meetings for team culture? Make them valuable and not just routine obligations. 🌐
• Tailor your delegation approach - not all team members thrive with complete autonomy. Customize based on their needs. 🎯
• Transparency builds trust, but be mindful when it comes to sharing sensitive information. 🔍
• Balance critique with positive reinforcement to ensure team morale and continuous improvement. 🎉

Overview

Layla's journey in managing small teams highlights the evolution from traditional management practices to adopting a servant leadership approach. She discusses how she has transitioned from a top-down delegation method to one where the leader supports the team from the bottom, making delegation a proactive effort rather than a passive task-sharing exercise.

She shares practical rules like balancing feedback, understanding the specifics of each team member’s working style, and the importance of setting up systems to make delegation clearer and more effective. Layla stresses the importance of tailoring management styles to fit the individual needs of team members to ensure they are not overwhelmed or left directionless.

Finally, she emphasizes the importance of transparency and adaptability in management. While open sharing builds trust and a cohesive work environment, knowing when to keep certain information private is crucial. Balancing criticism with recognition is key in creating an empowering atmosphere that fosters growth and builds a strong team culture.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 03:00: Introduction The Introduction chapter discusses the challenges of delegation and management, emphasizing that these topics are often overlooked in discussions despite their difficulty. The speaker shares personal experiences transitioning from managing college teams and small side jobs to running a small business. This transition highlighted the complexities of management and the importance of understanding people. Although the speaker hasn't completely mastered these skills, they have developed a set of rules for managing small teams that have made the process more manageable.
• 03:00 - 04:30: Rule 1: Be a Question Asker, Not a Problem Solver This chapter introduces the concept of delegation in management, challenging the conventional view of a hierarchical top-down approach. The author suggests that delegation should be viewed as an 'inverse triangle,' indicating that the process should empower those at the base to take ownership of tasks. Rules and habits established in business policies should reflect this belief. The chapter emphasizes the importance of being a question asker instead of a problem solver, promoting a culture of proactive engagement rather than directive management.
• 04:30 - 07:00: Rule 2: Balance Business Tasks with Team Support In this chapter, the author discusses the importance of balancing business tasks with team support through the lens of servant leadership. Initially, tasks are seen as something delegated to subordinates to accomplish organizational goals. However, this perspective shifts with the introduction of servant leadership, where the leader is positioned at the bottom, supporting their team. This approach provides clarity in delegation and management, forming the foundation for the 15 or 16 rules discussed in the context of leadership.
• 07:00 - 09:00: Importance of Systems and Processes In the chapter titled 'Importance of Systems and Processes', delegation is conceptualized as a 'push up' activity. The narrative describes a scenario where the speaker, positioned lower in the hierarchy, seeks assistance from those above. To effectively delegate tasks or responsibilities, one must take active steps to elevate these duties until they are picked up by someone more senior. This model challenges the trickle-down concept of delegation, emphasizing the effort and initiative required to engage support from higher levels, unless collaborating with a proactive individual.
• 09:00 - 10:30: Rule 3: Value Meetings for Culture Building The chapter emphasizes the importance of valuing meetings as a means to build and maintain organizational culture. It highlights the concept of delegation by suggesting that team members take initiative to relieve leaders of tasks. This approach requires effort and mutual understanding in managerial relationships. The speaker clarifies that the 16 rules discussed are based on personal experience and are not necessarily universal leadership principles.
• 10:30 - 14:00: Rule 4: Customize Delegation Levels This chapter discusses the importance of customizing delegation levels in management. The speaker reflects on their own experiences, wishing they had received certain advice earlier in their career to avoid mistakes. They emphasize that effective management doesn't require changing one's personality or spending more money, but rather understanding how to properly delegate tasks.
• 14:00 - 16:30: Rule 5: Balance Feedback The chapter titled 'Rule 5: Balance Feedback' discusses management strategies, particularly transitioning from being an explainer to becoming a questioner. Initially, managers often adopt the role of solving problems and explaining tasks, especially when working with junior staff. However, as teams mature, this approach should shift. The chapter highlights the importance of breaking the habit of always providing solutions and instead mastering the skill of asking insightful questions to guide team members. This shift fosters a more collaborative and empowering work environment.
• 16:30 - 18:00: Rule 6: Verify Self-reporting The chapter "Rule 6: Verify Self-reporting" focuses on handling situations where one might be stuck or unsure of how to respond to a client's question. It emphasizes the importance of not just solving the problem for the client, but also encouraging them to express more about their issues. The chapter introduces useful open-ended questions such as "Can you tell me more about that?" and "Why do you think that is?" to help draw out more information from the client. These questions serve as versatile tools in various scenarios to shift the responsibility back to the client and promote discussion.
• 18:00 - 19:30: Rule 7: Avoid Public Criticism The chapter emphasizes the importance of avoiding public criticism, especially in a management context. It suggests that focusing solely on individual contributions rather than team management can lead to ineffective leadership.
• 19:30 - 23:00: Rule 8: Expect Context, Not Common Sense In this chapter, the concept of 'working on the business' versus 'working in the business' is explored through the metaphor of a greenhouse. 'Working on the business' is likened to setting up and maintaining the structural elements of a greenhouse, such as ventilation and panel repair, ensuring the overall environment is conducive to growth. On the other hand, 'working in the business' is compared to being a plant within this greenhouse, focusing on individual growth tasks. The chapter emphasizes the importance of context over common sense in business operations.
• 23:00 - 27:00: Rule 9: Equality vs. Equity in Management The chapter discusses the shift in focus required when moving from being an independent team member to a managerial role. As a team member, the focus is on personal and individual achievements, akin to getting plants to grow. However, as a manager, the role transforms into creating an environment where systems and processes function efficiently to enable collective success. This means setting up an environment where multiple individuals or 'plants' can thrive together. Even in small teams, such as an individual managing their own YouTube content, ensuring these systems are in place is crucial for overall business success.
• 27:00 - 30:00: Rule 10: Trust Emotions, Probe Solutions The chapter titled 'Rule 10: Trust Emotions, Probe Solutions' discusses the importance of prioritizing people and culture over task execution in a work environment. The author emphasizes the need to support team members in personal crises, illustrating this by describing a scenario where they are willing to postpone their own tasks to cover for a team member dealing with a family emergency. The narrative highlights the belief that supporting the emotional well-being of team members ultimately benefits the organization more substantially than adhering strictly to task-oriented objectives.
• 30:00 - 35:00: Rule 11: Transparency and Communication In Rule 11, the focus is on the importance of transparency and communication within a team. The chapter discusses a scenario where a team member unexpectedly needs to take a week off and emphasizes the necessity of having well-defined processes and systems in place to ensure continuity of work. This ensures that the remaining team members can manage the workload effectively in the absence of a team member. The chapter highlights the common advice of needing processes and systems, explaining their crucial role in maintaining business operations smoothly, particularly in crisis situations.
• 35:00 - 40:00: Rule 12: Prepare for Mistakes This chapter discusses the importance of having a systemized business. It outlines the steps needed to create such a system, including the necessary components and their organization. The chapter also introduces the training program, Process Driven Foundations, which aims to teach teams how to establish and maintain a process-driven business foundation. The program focuses on guiding teams step-by-step through developing their systemized processes.
• 40:00 - 45:00: Conclusion: Evolving Management Skills The chapter titled 'Conclusion: Evolving Management Skills' emphasizes the importance of process foundations, encouraging readers to explore available resources linked in the description. It introduces the 'Systemization Snapshot,' a free operations audit tool designed to help teams assess their level of systemization. Furthermore, the chapter advises against dismissing meetings entirely, suggesting a more nuanced approach to evaluating and conducting them.

My 16 Rules for Managing a Small Team Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 delegation is hard and management is harder and nobody talks about it why I don't know but as somebody who has gone from you know managing teams in college and and small jobs off to the side to running a small team and owning her own business management and figuring out people has by far been my biggest challenge I have not gotten it all figured out but I have made it a lot easier for myself by picking up along the way what I like to call rules for managing a small team
• 00:30 - 01:00 my rules manifest in the policies and procedures I build for the business the different things I make habits for myself are the manifestation of rules but the rules themselves don't just come from the pie in the sky or some random person on the internet that you shouldn't listen to instead it comes from a belief that delegation is not a triangle it's an inverse triangle when I first started delegating I heard a lot of people describe management as this where you are on the top you have tasks
• 01:00 - 01:30 that need to be done or things that need to be accomplished you push them down to subordinates who help you bring those plans to life and this is kind of the picture I had in my head but somewhere along the line I was exposed to the concept of servant leadership the idea that the leader of a business the CEO in a traditional work chart is actually on the bottom and when I applied that framework to delegation and management all of a sudden everything made a lot more sense and it's the basis on which these 15 rules 16 rules are created so with servant leadership and this kind of
• 01:30 - 02:00 model I'm thinking about delegation as a push up okay so I'm down here I'm looking to get help for maybe these three different circles up here if I want to get help on tasks or responsibilities I can't just let go of that responsibility and trust that it will trickle down hill until it reaches somebody else below me no in this model when it comes to delegation and management the way I can make that happen is by lifting up that weight until somebody else above me can grab it or if I have a really proactive person
• 02:00 - 02:30 on my team perhaps they can reach down and grab tasks off my plate so rather than having gravity just result in tasks being move down the organization I just let go of things and they'll get done for me yeah instead of that we use effort effort is required to have delegation and successful managerial relationships and this belief is what fundamentally guides the 16 rules I'm going to go through in this video and by the way I'm sharing these 16 rules as my own personal rules of what works well for me I am not some kind of leadership
• 02:30 - 03:00 or coaching expert I just want to share what I found to be helpful because I really wish other folks have shared this during their Journey cuz I probably would have saved myself a lot of stupid mistakes and don't worry none of my rules involve things like making yourself into an extrovert when you're not just liking people more spending more money and people will manage themselves or you know my my favorite one don't be an which is like yeah I get it but how do you even understand if you're being an if you don't know how to manage not the most helpful advice so I'll be breaking down down my 16 rules into don'ts and
• 03:00 - 03:30 dos and let's just start right now rule number one don't view your job as being the person who has to explain things and solve problems I made that mistake very early on and for a long period of time because when you first start hiring you're usually hiring junior level roles and you do need to be this teacher and explainer but as you transition to the team that you should have this Behavior needs to stop and it is a hard habit to break instead my rule for management is to make sure you get really good at asking questions like really good if someone on your team comes to you and
• 03:30 - 04:00 says oh my gosh I'm stuck on this client question you need to know how to respond to that challenge and not just solve the problem for them one of my favorite questions I keep in my back pocket to make sure that when these kinds of situations happen even if I don't know what to say I have a question to kind of push the onus back to the person is the question uh can you tell me more about that or why do you think that is both of these questions are just open-ended catchalls you can use in any scenario to encourage the other person to give more
• 04:00 - 04:30 context or to do some critical thinking fors rule number two acting like an independent contributor an IC if you view yourself as somebody whose main job is to get work done I think that's a really great shortcut to make sure you're a shitty manager because yes often times if you are in management position you also have to get work done for example right here I'm the person on this team who films these videos I need to get this done and lately it's been a bit of a pinch you see I view the way I spend my time in two major categories it's either on the
• 04:30 - 05:00 business or in the business and I know people use those phrases a lot but it's often unclear what that means a good metaphor for this would be imagine that your business is a greenhouse working on the business would be setting up that Greenhouse getting the ventilation better fixing the panels that are broken making sure that front door latches working on the overall container where all the plants are thriving in meanwhile working in the business would be actually being a plant in that Greenhouse okay actually working on the different pieces and making sure that your things are growing that would be in
• 05:00 - 05:30 the business Behavior I view those as my two main categories and when you're an independent contributor just a team member who's doing their thing your focus is getting those plants to grow but when you shift to a manager your job is not just to grow plants it's to build the environment where many plants can grow where systems and processes can take over and everyone set up for Success even though right now in my business I am the only person filming these YouTube videos this is an important obligation I do every single week it's super important to the business success and everything but if I
• 05:30 - 06:00 have a team member coming up to me saying they're having a crisis in their house they need to take the day off cuz their little one sick you can bet that I'm going to postpone my YouTube filming to make sure I can cover for them or that someone can cover for them while they're out of the office because to me working on the machine supporting the people and the culture you're building is way more important than any tasks you do that are execution oriented even if those execution tasks are really really important to the business or to the team by the way if you put yourself in the
• 06:00 - 06:30 situation I described here and you picture someone on your team messaging you saying oh my gosh I'm going to be out for a whole week um I need to go handle this thing if you don't know how your team would be able to manage that how you would figure out what they needed to do how you would get their work done how they do their work to make sure that you can cover for them it might be a sign that you need some more processes and systems in your business and I know that's a cliche thing that so many people talk about you need processes and system what does that mean candal that's always bothered me to too and that's why at process driven we've
• 06:30 - 07:00 actually set out to construct exactly what it means to have a systemized business what are the things you need how are they organized what do you do first what do you do next how can you bring everything together and if that's something your team doesn't have and you would be interesting in adding into it you should consider working with us here at process driven our main training program process driven foundations will guide you and your team through the stepbystep of each piece you need to have in order to have a process-driven foundation of your business yes the name
• 07:00 - 07:30 process foundations is not that original you can find the details for this program in the description below but if you'd like to kind of assess hm is this the right fit for me I'm also going to share in the description below this little assessment that we've put together here at process driven it's called the systemization snapshot we created it here and it's basically a free operations audit where you can answer some questions and it will help you evaluate how systemized is your team really so you can check that out for free in the description below and with that let's get back to our next don't which is don't bash meetings unilaterally
• 07:30 - 08:00 um maybe this is just me but when I became a manager/ leer I immediately kind of took to task my hatred of meetings I hated meetings I hated sitting in them they often felt useless when I was on a team and so when I was running a team I was like hell no we're not going to have tons of meetings all the time I just I didn't want that but here's the thing no meetings especially when you are in a remote team essentially equates to having no culture because meetings are one of the best tools we have in our pocket to build culture in a remote environment or
• 08:00 - 08:30 really in any team that's where we come together and make it clear what's important what's not important who's winning who's losing these things that really help um create connections between people uh celebrations motivation all of these tools that we need at our disposal as a manager they're created often in meetings or in other group interactions and if we just cancel meetings unilaterally um well you're going to have a bad time so instead of this my do is to make sure that you do pray prioritize creating
• 08:30 - 09:00 meetings that have value that's very clear to everybody there if you or your team ever dread going to a meeting or they tell you hey this doesn't really feel like it's a good thing for my time feel free to re-evaluate but don't just scrap it all and say well because that meeting didn't feel productive we're never going to meet again because you're shooting yourself in the foot and ruining one of the best tools you have as a manager to really set out alignment and purpose fun fact I've actually noticed that meetings are most useful when it comes to nonwork talk nonwork connections so so ice breakers and those
• 09:00 - 09:30 kinds of things where you're celebrating wins and highs and lows that to me has proven to be the most valuable component of any meetings and the only thing I would absolutely never cut meanwhile discussing issues in problem solving which a lot of people use meetings for is actually something you can take offline pretty easily so just wish my past self had known that and sharing that with you in case you haven't experienced that yet next up don't assume that hands-off management is going to work for all people in fact it works for a very very slim minority of
• 09:30 - 10:00 people if you were going to give people a task in most cases just giving them the task and walking away is not going to set them up for success in fact I've experienced this and learned this the Hard Way Lea from the past why didn't you know this but I have on many occasions given people areas of responsibility or projects or tasks and said here full autonomy work on this project and you know because that's what I would want as an employee but these team members were not wired the same way I was they saw this project that they had complete freedom to do I wasn't
• 10:00 - 10:30 going to be involved in anything unless there was a problem and that freedom caused Mayhem those team members could have had so much success they had the capability of getting the work done but because they didn't have enough structure they got paralyzed procrastinated they didn't get the project done on time or in many cases at all it just became this overwhelming paralysis and then it would often turn around and say well you didn't support me enough and I'd be sitting there thinking but I thought autonomy was good I Was a Fool instead of assuming that everybody wants autonomy because that's
• 10:30 - 11:00 what you would want um the better way of doing this is to understand there is a spectrum of Delegation levels you can be really detailed you can be really hands-off and for very few people do you want to be fully hands off or fully hands on very very few people for most people you're going to be somewhere in the middle where you're communicating the end result maybe a few key steps to get there maybe you're checking in at the one month and the two-month Mark by dialing this delegation complexity to what the actual person is ready for
• 11:00 - 11:30 capable of and likes to experience you're going to set up both parties for Less disappointment less frustration and a more successful project and unfortunately for many people the fully autonomous way of Delegation is just not going to work for them the next rule I have is to balance my feedback whenever I'm giving feedback on something unless it is abor terrible and it's just you know this is not going to work we want to sprinkle in feedback of both sides if you're in charge of say proofreading a newsletter that someone wrote you are going to be going through and revising
• 11:30 - 12:00 sentences and making changes but take the extra 20 seconds to also Circle the things that are really good the really good subject line the great way they signed off the attention to detail around UTM links whatever is good take the time to highlight that my goal is always at least one positive thing for every four negative things if it is you know a feedback thing where your whole job is to be negative always sprinkle in that positive component as well another process I use to make sure I am balancing in the positive is a weekly routine it's called something like fill
• 12:00 - 12:30 in Personnel files and it's basically pops ups every week and it just prompts me to say hey did anything good or anything bad happen with this team member this week if so add an entry into their personnel file which is just a spreadsheet I maintain with kind of a log of information about each person on the team the reason I love this is because when things go terribly wrong like H so many examples I don't want to necessarily give in this video and someone you know has a behavior incident and something like that um I remember immediately to put it in their person L file because it's so bad I'm like oh my
• 12:30 - 13:00 goodness we need to log this as a disciplinary action all this other stuff but when something's good or when nothing's drama filled it is really easy to forget to log that in someone's personnel file so you end up with a personnel file that's only logging bad things and that's not very helpful for performance feedback or to evaluate someone's contributions to the team so this routine really helps me keep the positive friend of mine proactively every week my next rule is don't rely on self-reporting exclusively sure trust people Trust what they say but take a
• 13:00 - 13:30 moment to double check things particularly if somebody is new to the position that you've put them in for example if somebody says they are so swamped they're so busy everything's so stressful take a moment to confirm that they're actually working you know a full-time schedule we've had situations where people are in that mode but we find out that they're only working half of the week and then the stress actually comes from them working half a week when they're supposed to be working full-time and not verifying this um not a good thing to do checking time tracking and project progress proactively in addition
• 13:30 - 14:00 to listening to what people are telling you and trying to trust their feedback is a good Balancing Act to just make sure you don't end up in the situation I was where you're maybe lied to for over a month and you just didn't think to check and you know lesson learn the hard way my next rule is don't speak negatively in public rather than you know pointing out that Susie messed up this email in the all team meeting pull Susie aside and talk about that in your oneon-one in the meeting focus on positive things or maybe team wide feedback that's either negative or
• 14:00 - 14:30 positive this applies to all sorts of topics but I do have one little exception that me being a little cheeky uh still believes in which is my exception to this rule is if the thing that you're speaking negatively about is a common enemy you see a common enemy for your team could be something that you're all fighting against you're fighting against overpriced software you're fighting against the old way of doing things and if you want to speak negatively about that in a team environment that's actually going to be great it's going to bring your team closer together and it's just a little bit of fun to like bash on ah I can't
• 14:30 - 15:00 believe they did that again I mean camaraderie comes in all sorts of forms next rule don't expect to be treated the way that you treat other people you got to go into this position with some fixed skin understand that you are going to be criticized in public even though you don't do that to other people you are going to receive only negative feedback even though you don't do that to other people when you give a recommendation on LinkedIn people are not going to return the favor there's just that power Dynamic that comes with being in charge that people think ah they don't need it they're in charge that's their payment I don't need to return these favors and
• 15:00 - 15:30 that's just kind of the nature of leadership and management I remember I was watching the show Tokyo Vice if you've seen that on HBO and like two months into this person owning this shop their her employees were throwing her a surprise party to say thank you so much for all that you do and I remember sitting there with my husband watching the show being like that's how you know whoever wrote this show is not actually a business owner because management is often viewed to be compensated just by the power that's your compensation so to have a thank you party two months into managing your company yeah I I don't
• 15:30 - 16:00 think so U I'm six and a half years in and I'll let you know if that ever happens but I don't expect it to and that's totally okay instead of being hurt or bothered by this uh just get used to it you know get used to taking the blame for things that aren't your fault and get used to giving away credit for literally everything you know you could write 95% of an email but if one team member wrote the other 5% just give them full credit for writing that email um that's just the way it goes in this position and something that I wish I would have known earlier on it probably would have made me a lot happier in the
• 16:00 - 16:30 position my next rule is don't try to be relatable um I think early on especially in my journey I would really try to I don't know find things in common with my team members and bond with them with that as I would if I was a peer on the team and that's just not helpful you are in the position of leadership and management hopefully because you are different in some way you have some kind of complimentary strength and what I've come to realize over the last six plus years in this particular position is you got to lean into that just be weird just
• 16:30 - 17:00 embrace the unique things that got you into the position you are and leaning into those differences will actually inspire trust and loyalty in a much more healthy way than trying to lean into some of the personal differences or to simplify your personality to be more familiar to the person you're talking with a great environment for where you can highlight these differences in this uniqueness and build this inspiration and trust is one-on-one meetings with your direct report which is the one meeting at process driven I will Almost Never cancel even if life gets busy because it is the best best meeting you can have for making sure your team is
• 17:00 - 17:30 actually jelling through the strength of those one-on-one relationships I actually have a whole video where I go through the meeting agendas and Cadence that we use here at process driven in case you want to steal it it's up here in this video rule number two don't trust your memory instead write everything down you are not needing to just manage your own work but also make sure you are supporting the work of many many other people your brain is not big enough to remember all of those details make a habit of writing things down especially if you are trying to encourage Behavior change for example if you want to hold somebody
• 17:30 - 18:00 accountable to saying hey I'm going to make sure I'm working 40 hours a week next week great in your next oneon-one meeting at a bullet point today a week early to say make sure we talk about your work schedule to check in on the progress these kinds of reminders and notes to yourself makes holding people accountable a whole lot easier which is one of the most important parts of your job and Mak sure that your brain doesn't explode with all the things you're just supposed to memorize next rule remove Common Sense from your dictionary because there's no such thing common sense is not common it's just what you
• 18:00 - 18:30 think is normal based on your upbringing based on your job experience based on your knowledge and to assume that somebody else is going to have the exact same wiring and view something as common sense is kind of just arrogant uh remove that from your dictionary instead you really need to focus on communication and making sure that you're communicating at a level that people understand what the desired behavior is I know in my own experience I have had times where I'm just like you know that's common sense why didn't they just do that but the reasons somebody didn't do the thing I thought they should just
• 18:30 - 19:00 do is often because someone is lacking context they don't know the key metrics that I view to be important in that project they don't know the end state I'm hoping that project will accomplish they don't have the vision of where we're going because I haven't communicated it all of these pieces of context are floating around in the business owner or the manager's brain because you've been in that strategy call but they maybe haven't and it is our job to communicate that and the only way you can communicate that is removing words like Common Sense from your diction and replacing it with context
• 19:00 - 19:30 you know why didn't they have the context to do this thing why didn't they have the context to solve this problem it's not common sense it's context and it's something that you can and should be filling in next rule as a manager you don't want to be in the habit of creating and ideating brainstorming and generating ideas and Creations is something you can do but not with your manager hat on as a manager your job primarily is to improve and remind so you want to hold people accountable and you want to find find Opportunities to make things a little bit better but
• 19:30 - 20:00 holding yourself to that kind of enablement position make sure that you're making your team the stars of the show if you start going into superhero mode of I'm going to create something totally new and ide8 you're adding more work you're not making work easier and you're becoming the superhero charging off into the sunset instead whenever you have that management hat on for an hour a day two hours a day your whole day whatever that is focus on really making things better making things easier making things clearer and holding people to account for the ways they're going to do that same work the next one is
• 20:00 - 20:30 actually one that I picked up from an economics class in college my favorite Professor used to say equality is not equity and I want to break that down here because it relates to your team you don't want to treat your team equally everybody the exact same way because treating everybody the exact same way is probably going to guarantee that the majority of people are unhappy instead you want to treat people equitably equitably refers to being fair while equally suggest equal proportions for each person sometimes the fair thing to do would actually be to give some people more support support and some people less support you don't want to treat
• 20:30 - 21:00 everybody the same way you want to be like Jane Goodall you want to observe behaviors of your team you know what people's goals are what their values are what motivates them what communication best works for them do they brainstorm well in a group do they prefer to have time to think about things do they like an agenda in advance would they rather improv would they rather have a call would they rather have a video chat all of these things are behaviors and preferences that you need to understand about your team members by listening really well and asking good questions and then use that to treat people equitably in the way that's going to set them up best for Success even if
• 21:00 - 21:30 it's entirely different than how you would treat somebody else on the team a great place to demonstrate this would be in your one1 meetings uh here at process driven I try to remind every person I'm working with that their one-on-one meeting is their time there's one or two things I always want to cover things like feedback and you know challenges but if they want to have the call at 7:00 a.m. or 5:00 p.m. or if they want to have the call and focus in on their career growth as opposed to day-to-day work whatever their focus is whatever they want to hit on in that oneon-one I try to really make it clear that that meeting is theirs and I will say the
• 21:30 - 22:00 people I meet with right now every single one-on-one meeting uh they don't follow the same agenda they don't feel the same they don't run the same way and I think that's a good thing as you're trying to serve the way people need to be served my next tip is to not just expect people to tell you when something is wrong especially if they have a solution for it for example someone on your team might say hey I'm really stressed out I want to take some time off at the end of this month to just take some time to decompress instead of just taking that at face value my my response in those situations knowing
• 22:00 - 22:30 what I know now would be to trust the emotion that someone conveys like in this case they're feeling really stressed but maybe challenge or just kind of poke a little bit to confirm that the solution that they want is truly the right solution so in this instance I might ask uh why do you want to take time off at the end of the month if you're stressed out now or is that the best solution for you those types of questions are just going to allow you to probe a little bit deeper and make sure that people are not self-filtering what they tell you because candid most people particular particularly folks who were socialized as a female are going to
• 22:30 - 23:00 sugarcoat and hold back and restrain themselves and and give to you not what they want but what they think that they can have and that can sometimes cause more harm than good my next rule of management is to not create walls rather than viewing yourself as a manager of building this room for the elite your corner office of knowledge uh try to share as much as you can there's very little as a manager that you don't want to have shared with your team especially if your team is a little bit more mature like you're not working with team teers at the ice cream shop uh you you can
• 23:00 - 23:30 share a lot of information with these adults to help them understand the circumstances the only acceptions to the transparency guideline I would put here are things like Personnel and performance information I would never share if somebody on the team is struggling in an area or on a performance plan um unless you know that circumstance impacted another person and another thing might be in financially insecure times or in other areas that could be triggers to people you might want to just check before you share to say hey I'm going to be sharing this if you're not interested in learning about this or this is going to stress you out
• 23:30 - 24:00 that's okay skip out on this section this is actually why at process driven we practice pay transparency because I think finances are a really important thing for everybody to understand so everyone our team when they join they get added into a spreadsheet that's shared with the whole team that shows exactly how much everybody is making what their benefits are you know all of this other stuff in one spreadsheet that everybody on the team can see my last rule is actually one that I'm going to name based on a term that I learned from a former team member Carly who described it as honor student syndrome and basically this rule is about not
• 24:00 - 24:30 expecting that just because you follow these rules and you try your best and you work really hard that things are going to go well it sounds a little bit sad to say this but I don't mean it in a depressing way I just think when you get into a management position and you're surrounding yourself with humans who are unpredictable and you need to support even though that's going to look different every single day even if you follow all of these rules and you try your best and you have the best of intentions you will do the wrong thing you will hire the wrong people you will
• 24:30 - 25:00 mess up a disciplinary conversation you will screw up and that's just a reality that you can't beat yourself up on you just need to understand it's going to happen in the same way that everyone on your team at some point or another is going to mess up it's just going to happen so the way to counteract this and the thing I wish I knew six years ago is despite that you need to fully believe that you and the people around you can make things right this rule sounds so simple when I'm saying it abstractly in
• 25:00 - 25:30 this video but in those moments where you realize oh my God I hired a monster like this is the worst person on our team how did they get through our screening oh my gosh how are we going to get out of this or you find out that someone is stealing from you or that they were conducting employment fraud I mean all of these things have happened to me and I remember especially early on that it would just break me down I would just be like how did I let this happen why didn't I get this right and it would just hurt it would be like a sucker punch and recognizing now that it's not
• 25:30 - 26:00 about the strength to never have a mistake it's about the strength to get through the mistake it really it really helped me and maybe it'll help you as well one tool that I've used to really make this more okay for me is actually starting to do quarterly journals and not the kind that you're thinking of more of a video journal and I actually publish it here on YouTube every single quarter it's called Lea's look back you can find it up here on this playlist this journal process allows me time to reflect and learn on the areas where things didn't go so well and give myself some Grace to say all right that didn't work that's okay I am telling everybody
• 26:00 - 26:30 publicly on the internet that I totally screwed this up and with that I'm going to get stronger with this muscle and get more and more used to it so I don't know if that's something you might want to try out maybe just a written journal or something with your team but it's really been helpful to me so to review these are the 15 no 16 why do I keep doing that the 16 rules that I look at when I am trying to delegate up in my organization when I realize things are going to be hard it's because they're supposed to be hard that's what delegation is it's work it's not just gravity it's your effort it's your care
• 26:30 - 27:00 it's your time and attention that allows you to build a team that has layers and layers and layers of support all based on the effort and intention that you can put or pull into that business right now process driven I'm actually getting ready to work on a project that's actually going to force me to improve my delegation and management skills even more learning from some of the experts we have in our community so I wanted to make this video to just kind of capture a moment in time of these are the rules I have right now and I'd love to hear what you'd add to this because I'm hoping maybe in a year in two years we
• 27:00 - 27:30 can come back and do an update to this video of some of the things I've learned you know year seven you're eight into management these 16 rules capture my values around managing a team right now today but by building out processes and systems in your business you can institutionalize the values that are important to you and your team and if you need help doing that you're not sure how to start building systems and processes check out the link in the description below for our process driven foundations program but if you're not quite ready for process driven foundations but you still want to make sure you are managing your small team
• 27:30 - 28:00 effectively a great starting point would be defining the roles and responsibilities on your team we have more of that on this video here on the end screen my name is Lea I'm the owner here at process driven where we're trying to Pioneer the way for small teams to be sustainable and systemized at the same time without Dusty policy binders or tons of bureaucracy if you enjoy this content and would like to see more please do like and subscribe and until next time remember to enjoy the process