Provide Objectives, Not Plans
Be careful: You might be adding too much value
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My name is Conor. I’m helping shape how teams work at Hugo, bringing together your meetings, notes, and tasks all in one place.
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In his management book, What Got You Here Won't Get You There, Marshall Goldsmith points out an interesting trend in leadership. The higher you get in an organization, the more your suggestions become interpreted as orders.
Crazy, right? Merely being a leader makes it harder to empower others in your organization to contribute their best.
So how do you help guide and direct your company while still allowing people to feel ownership of their projects?
Give them objectives to meet, not plans to execute.
😬 Adding *too* much value
We’re not advocating providing objectives without giving input as to how they can be successfully achieved. Leading also involves contributing strategy, ideas, and resources so that team members can be successful. But always frame these conversations in terms of the objectives, where everything that comes after is a recommendation or resource.
This ties into another of Goldsmith’s main points. In his book, he shines a bright light on a concept in leadership he refers to as adding too much value.
By contributing too much to projects, you actually diminish others’ ownership of their ideas.
When you add to the idea, it no longer feels like it is their idea — which kills momentum. It also quickly devolves into micromanagement, which stifles creativity and suppresses employee potential.
Adding too much value also deprives your team members of gaining satisfaction from their work. Daniel Pink discusses this with his notion of autonomy in Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.
According to Pink, autonomy motivates us to think creatively because we don’t need to conform to strict rules. He suggests rethinking traditional ideas of control — up to and including regular office hours, dress codes, and numerical goals — in order to increase staff autonomy and boost innovation, creativity, and engagement.
You can see how even if you think your plans and ideas are better, the ultimate outcome will often be worse if you deprive your team of autonomy. What’s better is to identify new opportunities leading to the agreed outcome. Then trust each other to get the job done. To help you take this approach, whenever you are setting up a project, ask yourself the following questions.
🤔 Am I framing this in terms of the expected outcome, or what I think should be done?
Often, this requires taking the idea or proposed solution in your head, and zooming out to identify the objective. This can feel counterintuitive. As you take a step back, you feel like you’re throwing away your great idea. But you’re not.
You’re sharing what you really care about with the intelligent group around you, in case your conclusion isn’t the best solution.
Start with the results you’re aiming for, and work your way down from there.
Working with product and engineering teams, this is easy to mess up. There’s a strong temptation to take a solution to engineering and ask them to implement it. But more often than not, telling them what we’re trying to achieve leads to a much better outcome.
The engineers’ fresh solution usually works better, solves other problems we didn’t consider, and gets built quicker. And if what they come back with is dramatically different than what I was thinking, and doesn’t look like it’s going to work, then I can begin to ask questions about why they are approaching the problem in that way.
🗣 Is it clear that the suggestions I am making are in fact suggestions?
Framing things in terms of objectives doesn’t mean that you can’t contribute ideas. It means you need to provide suggestions, not marching orders. How do you do this? How do you make yourself a resource to help unblock team progress, rather than a dictator mapping out every step they take? It’s a combination of mindset, culture, and careful word choice.
One technique that we like to use in design reviews at Hugo is to try to only ask questions. So instead of saying something like, “I think this button isn’t prominent enough and that people are going to miss it,” we might ask, “Do you think that users will be able to notice this button the way that it is currently styled?”
See how a simple reframing of a declarative sentence into a question immediately eliminates the idea that this might be an order? It is still an important point to take in, but it gives the designer an opportunity to receive feedback, think through the logic, and make a decision based on their own point of view and expertise. They may have had a good reason for the original design, which they now will share with you.
“It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” — Steve Jobs
To do this successfully, you need to deliberately take time out of your schedule to stop and orient yourself.
With the mutual trust that you’ve built up, your team is counting on you to make sure they’re headed in the right direction.
📚 Reads of the week
Applying Leverage as a Product Manager
“Managerial leverage is the idea that some things create more output than others, and for each possible thing, the amount of output created per unit of time is its leverage. That’s the basis of how you should decide whether to do A or B.”
Quick or Accurate
I used to work as a data scientist, so this tweet from Caitlin Hudon on her team’s data intake form resonated. Often, you have to choose between quick and extremely accurate information.
Some Guiding Principles
There are some interesting bite-sized pieces of advice here that go beyond the workplace. I really like a few of them, notably, “Your decisions are meant to empower others, not control them.”
Thanks for reading Future of Teamwork this week! Did anything stand out? I’d love to hear about it. Reply to this email or tweet at me and let’s chat 😁
Until next time,
Conor