Provide Your Capacity to Your Team
As a startup leader and manager, supporting and enabling your team is one of your most important jobs. Yet sometimes, being available feels like you are not doing “enough.”
As we found a startup, we assemble a team, often of co-founders, and begin to build. Each contributes individually and collaboratively. As the team grows, you eventually need to start delegating and managing, which can be quite a transition.
For me, early in my career, the transition from individual contributor to manager was a bit traumatic. I was used to efficiently completing deliverables and being able to cross tasks off my list. Once I was responsible for a team, I had to learn that the team’s overall efficiency depended on me being available to support and facilitate the team’s work. That felt strange because a significant portion of my work became indirect, enabling others to be effective. It felt like I was not getting as many tasks done.
As I progressed in my career from being a manager of individual contributors to being a manager of managers, I saw the same conundrum play out for those I was leading who were transitioning from individual contributor to manager. Coaching them often meant clarifying that their efforts supporting their team by responding, providing context, coaching, and barrier-busting constitutes legitimate work, even if it is hard to directly point to a resulting deliverable or task crossed off the list. It takes a while for a newly minted manager to redefine what effective work looks like as they learn to consider the overall productivity of the whole team. Investing in force multipliers requires a different, more comprehensive mindset.
While leading a small startup means that I often grab hold of a critical problem and crank out deliverables directly, as well as providing the support needed by my managers and individual contributors, I must allocate enough of my time to enable me to be available to my team. My personal rule of thumb is to try to reserve about 50% of my time each week for my team. And that does not mean scheduling a ton of regular meetings with them, although sometimes that can be part of it. It means just knowing that when I plan my day/week, about half of my time needs to be available to be responsive to issues that come up. It means that when I start my day, I need to mentally cede control of a significant portion of it and not set myself up by planning to fill my work hours with individual contributor tasks because then I will not be able to respond when one of my team reaches out and asks if I have a few minutes to talk about a problem they are having or to review a deliverable they think they have close to the finish line. The bottom line is that for my startup to be maximally successful, I need to reserve about half my time to provide my capacity to enabling the rest of my team. (The other half of my time gets poured into those things that I am best positioned to do personally, like strategic planning, fundraising, business development, selling, and product visioning.)
In the startup world, where teams are small and lean for the critical initial periods, there is a flip side to this balance between individually generating deliverables and managing others. Sometimes as startup CEOs, we are looking for those with particularly deep functional experience to join us – and some well-meaning folks will suggest that we hire someone with that functional expertise from a big industry player. The problem is that the flipside of learning to take on the work of a manager is remembering how to deliver as an individual contributor. Often, those who have been working for a while in much larger organizations may have migrated into purely managerial roles where all of their work is managing others. Just as it can be challenging to step up into a managerial position, it can also be difficult for such team members to get used to the idea that they actually have to spend a significant portion of their time laying hands on the work itself and cranking out deliverables. I have encountered people who simply could not imagine that they could not just always be reaching out to someone in our small startup team to actually deliver the work. They were so used to being in a big organization with abundant specialized resources to call on that they could not get their heads wrapped around the idea that a startup manager needed to do as well as manage. Watch out for this mindset in potential hires because a hiring mistake like this can become a huge and costly drag on the startup’s overall productivity until the startup reaches a scale where purely managerial roles become appropriate. My rule of thumb is that this threshold is not reached until a startup has at least 50-100 employees, and even then, it will only be in a few functions initially.
Finding the right balance between contributing work deliverables personally and preserving capacity and a bigger picture perspective to be an enabler and empowerer of your team is a dynamic and critical process for succeeding in building a startup.
