As a leader of a small business, my chief job as a direct manager is really to help them maintain the velocity. We maintain a series of processes that I supervise which my team asks questions and needs clarifications throughout the day. In our day-to-day work, ideally 80% or more of the replies from me should be non-critical and non-blocking.
When we are leading up to the launch of a new product, blocking and time sensitive inquiries increase significantly which in my experience has more to do with the increased velocity of work completed as opposed to not giving our team autonomy over their tasks.
The Chief Responsibility of a Leader is to rally people to a better future.
The job of a great manager is someone that turns one person's talent into performance. If you're good as a manager, it's because people work harder for you than they would for somebody else. If they don't work harder for you than they would for someone else, get out of management.
The manager's job is to be a catalyst to speed up the reaction between the talent of the employee and the goals of the organization.
— Marcus Buckingham
Our Shared Intent
When I meet with my team, I'm often trying to pose questions to them to improve the quality of our collective decision and also giving them an exercise in how I believe our team should approach the problems we are facing.
- What are we trying to accomplish?
- Who are we talking to?
- What are their expectations for our product?
- Where are they going to be seeing our product or message?
- When is the best time to connect with them?
Autonomy
My ability to speed up the reaction of my team starts with me enabling them to make decisions themselves. The people closest to the information and customer are most likely going to have unique insight that managers don't have.
How can we enable team members to make decisions?
This starts with giving people a voice in team meetings and making sure they know their thoughts and input are valued. Everyone on a team should be able to make decisions related to the work they are doing. Junior team members will need more guidance in the first few years, and senior team members should be able to deliver results with little input needed from the team lead.