The focused organization
Making the right things not not happen
Hi all —
Some people dream of leading large organizations, managing teams, and developing people. I am not one of them.
My specialty is figuring the business out. Which I think of as:
Figuring each part of the business out (product, go-to-market, etc.)
Making the first functioning version of each part of the business, then hiring specialists to improve & scale.
Figuring out how each part fits into a coherent whole.
But success in this world turns the artist into the art director - more time managing specialists who hire people and manage departments.
In other words, I am working to become the person who can lead organizations, manage teams, and develop people because that’s what the business needs. As I dig into this and recall my business school coursework, writing on management all just seems so fluffy: Empower your people, coach them, hold people accountable, be a servant leader, set clear goals, create psychological safety, communicate your vision, set up policies and processes, etc etc etc etc.
They all have the timbre of “sounding right” yet don’t fit together in my head to form a coherent thing. So I’ve spent a while thinking, testing, and tinkering — my thoughts are still forming, but here’s where I am right now. If you’ve figured out a better management framework, please let me know!
Management feels like helping people achieve their goals over time. Or to successfully handle what they are accountable for. But the positive framing (“help achieve X outcome”) puts an interventionist topspin on management, where the negative framing (“help not miss X outcome”) keeps the goal on the employee’s plate.
So let’s invert: Management is really about helping people avoid missing their goals.
What causes people to miss their goals? In my experience:
Not knowing the goal they’re accountable for
Juggling too many goals
Getting distracted from focusing on the goal
Not knowing how to execute towards the goal
Not focusing on the highest-leverage things to achieve the goal
Which means my role is to help prevent opacity, distraction, and poor execution in service of achieving the team’s goals.
How do you prevent opacity?
Make sure roles & accountabilities aren’t opaque
Make sure goals are few and aren’t opaque
How do you prevent distraction?
Make sure there’s a regular cadence of “show-and-tell” sessions that show the scoreboard vs. goals, which make it less likely that goals get deprioritized
How do you prevent poor execution?
Get a world-class mentor for your team who knows what “excellent” looks like
Make sure the “show-and-tell” cadence also covers the projects in focus, and that there’s some way to dig deeper into each project.
When setting goals, make sure we figure out how we’re going to achieve them.
I need to visualize this - to me, the management system looks like this:
And the simplest possible articulation of a department’s roles and accountabilities can be done in a single screenshot on your phone:
This is a simple starting point, the coherent “whole” upon which other things can evolve. It can also be fractal, in that it can work at multiple levels without changing much: You can use it to manage one person, one team, one department, one company.
Management is hard, and I can’t say I’ve “figured it out” yet. But this management system at least helps me get everything straight in my head, and the simplicity and coherence makes it manageable.