Keep the Red Pen Under Control

Building an empowered team is essential for growing a high-potential startup – and achieving empowerment requires a leader to be disciplined in delegating and giving feedback – or else!

As a management consultant in the 1990s, I learned much about leading teams. When I first became a manager, responsible for delegating and reviewing my team’s work, I went overboard using my proverbial red editing pen. A team member would give me a document to review, and I would hand it back with so many edits that it was practically impossible to discern the original content. Fortunately, the negative impact of tearing up someone else’s work quickly became apparent as I discovered that applying liberal amounts of red pen to rewrite work that someone else had drafted discouraged and disempowered my team rather than helping them (and me!) succeed.

What was going on?

Part of it was undoubtedly that I was still learning to discern the full spectrum of what good could look like. That is actually a skill that takes experience and practice. I was also discovering that there are often multiple ways to achieve a particular objective and that stylistic differences from how I would say something are not inherently wrong. I was also early in understanding my own strengths and weaknesses as a content generator. For example, I am prone to drafting complex run-on sentences when writing a document. It took a few years for me to both accept that as a common weakness in my writing – and to embrace the help of my editors, who would point out and help me fix such problems. I had so much to learn!

How does this translate into leading startups?

The founders/leaders of startups have to wear many hats to accomplish the wide variety of tasks required to build a company from scratch. This means that we are often in the position of delegating and reviewing the work of others, including in domains where we may lack our own specific expertise. These are the conditions where it is easy to be critical from a position of only moderate expertise, possibly resulting in providing less than great feedback. Yet, as a startup leader/founder, we often need to figure out how to do the best we and our small team collectively can. Developing your skills as a leader, delegator, author/content generator, and editor is a high-leverage investment to improve your personal and your company’s effectiveness and performance.

Tips for Keeping the Red Pen Under Control

One of the strengths that helps me succeed is the ability to generate a very clear idea of both what needs to be accomplished and the detailed steps we should take to get there. That clarity is a powerful skill; however, it also means that it can be challenging to release some control and let others carry the ball. With time, trial and error, and ultimately disciplined practice, I learned to be more selective in editing my team’s work. I found that focusing only on fixing critical errors while allowing variation in questions of style achieved an effective balance by ensuring that mistakes didn’t make it out the door but also allowed my team members to grow and learn along the way. I started training myself to be more intentional in approaching my review and to become better at avoiding over-editing. This demanded that I manage my controlling impulses and improve my up-front delegation. Some of my lessons learned include:

1. Provide clear goals and direction up-front with defined guardrails to equip my team with all the information they need to be successful. Doing this demanded that I put in the preparatory work to clarify what I was asking for rather than being lazy and asking my team to guess.
   
   
2. Focus my editing and feedback on fixing only actual errors and perhaps a few concrete things that could help my team learn and succeed. This means making sure I am explaining why something needs to change rather than just rewriting it and expecting the rationale to be obvious.
   
   
3. Ask myself if something is actually wrong or is just a difference in style before deciding that I need to make an edit. If I have to write or rewrite everything, we will be bottlenecked by my capacity. It is imperative that I assess the risk of a particular document and scale my degree of editing to match the risk level. Allowing room for another author’s creativity and style strengthens the whole team’s capabilities and capacity as long as it is effective.
   
   
4. Recognize that it is hard to edit one’s own drafts because the way you wrote it almost always makes sense to you, even if not to others, so make a habit of trading authoring and editing roles with other skilled writers on your team. Now, when a document or an email is important, I also make it a habit to ask another person to review and edit my work. This accomplishes two things – first, it keeps me humble to routinely submit myself to the editing of another, and second, it always makes my work better because my editor will see things that I look past and will often be able to improve upon the current draft. Trading the author and editor roles back and forth helps each of you learn and makes your collaborative work much better.
   
   
5. Use new grammar editing tools routinely to catch spelling, grammar, and other writing errors. It is worth the money to pay for the premium versions of these tools. However, these tools are imperfect, so continue to apply your judgment on whether to accept each suggested correction and ask someone else on your team to give important documents an independent review before sending them out.

While I (and frankly everyone!) will always have room to continue to grow and learn, one area where I continue to turn my critical eyes on myself is asking for feedback and seeking to improve how I can continue to do a better job setting my team members up for success. Using that red editing pen with care and intention to build skills, trust, and empowerment can make all of us better together – and that teamwork can help the startup succeed.