Do you have a team or not?
If you’re a manager and your reports don’t regularly talk to each other, in what sense do you have a team?
It’s common for new managers — especially if they manage a production workflow that leads to the creation of tangible assets like design or content — to focus on their individual relationship with each direct report. As important is building the relationships between your reports, so that they can operate as a team even in your absence.
You should be spending most of your time with your peers. You can’t do that if you are always bombarded with questions from your team. And even if that weren’t enough reason, you want to be making full use of the considerable brain power you have available, right?
I sometimes say to my team that I want us to be 7 brains, not 1 brain and 7 bodies. When managers have presentation-heavy team meetings, don’t have team meetings at all, or make the other team-building mistakes I’m about to lay out, they inadvertently reduce the functional brainpower of their teams because they make themselves the choke point for all ideas and decision making.
Can you pass the “hit by a bus” test?
If you got hit by a bus tomorrow, what would happen to your team? If you have done your job as a manager, they should be able to at least maintain their current level of operation for a few weeks or months.
If you are exceptional and you had an exceptionally talented team, they may even be able to evolve to continue to meet the changing demands of the business, tackling new problems and effectively making decisions as a group even in your absence. But this is a high bar.
You should be able to step out of day-to-day operations without things collapsing, because you need to be able to do that if you want to also be able to do the planning, information gathering, and generally future-looking work of management. Small business owners and founders talk about working “on the business” instead of “in the business,” and the same applies to managers — if you work on day-to-day tasks you lose the ability to work on improving the capabilities and resourcing of your team long-term.
I say that my goal as a manager (other than the central job of growing the business) is to “build the capacity for self-organization” in my team. I phrase it that way because I am a nerd who reads too many books about systems theory. Here’s a description from the one I recommend people start with, Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems.
“Self-organization produces heterogeneity and unpredictability. It is likely to come up with whole new structures, whole new ways of doing things. It requires freedom and experimentation, and a certain amount of disorder. These conditions that encourage self-organization often can be scary for individuals and threatening to power structures.”
She later emphasizes that self-organization can be unpopular because of its unpredictability. It’s this exact freedom and unpredictability which makes it so important on teams. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a crystal ball (the one I got on Amazon doesn’t work), and the future will come with challenges I don’t yet know how to solve. That’s where a self-organizing system thrives.
Building the capacity for self-organization can be difficult because teams tend to defer decision-making to the manager. To overcome that tendency, you have to do something many managers are uncomfortable with.
Stop solving problems.
To build the strength of your team, you need to stop solving problems. Instead, make them solve problems with each other.
Your report has a question and they come to you for an answer. You know the answer, so you give it to them. All good, yeah?
Lots of managers got promoted because they were great individual contributors and love solving problems, so this feels like the most natural extension of their abilities. Unfortunately, management is not just a promotion; it’s a fundamental change in the job, and that makes answering simple questions a mistake.
You don’t want your team to come to you with every question.
You will sometimes have the answer, but!
You will get interrupted a lot
You will sometimes have the answer, but there’s someone at the company who has more details and context, and you will reach out to that person for clarification (taking more of your time)
You will sometimes have an answer, but the question is not so simple and there could be multiple correct courses of action
By answering questions when asked, you encourage your team to turn off their own brains
Which would you prefer — your team comes to you with every problem and a question, or they notice the problem and solve it on their own before you even hear about it? The latter will never happen if you are the team problem-solver.
As much as possible, I respond to questions in these three ways:
Ask a “what” or “how” question to understand more about what’s behind the ask. Understanding the ask behind the ask can clarify what to do next or even result in the person reaching their own conclusion. I will follow these questions with “what would you recommend,” and if they still aren’t sure move on to point 3.
Direct them to the person within the company best able to answer their question. Don’t play messenger! Just put them in touch with the right person and stand back — you want them to have these lines of communication so they can solve problems on their own.
Ask them to bring the question to the team meeting for discussion (or just work directly with another teammate). Sometimes we want to get more brains on the problem, and encouraging the team to work together without my presence is a big part of building the capacity for self-organization.
There can be sticking points and I can help the team through them without giving a definitive answer. Other times, a room full of peers has trouble pushing for a decision and winds up talking in circles. Here’s Andy Grove making that observation in High Output Management.
“We named this the peer-plus-one approach, and have used it since then to aid decision-making where we must. Peers tend to look for a more senior manager, even if he is not the most competent or knowledgeable person involved, to take over and shape a meeting. Why? Because most people are afraid to stick their necks out.”
In this model, the peers discuss and the manager speaks up only when it’s clear that it’s decision time (and a decision isn’t being made). You can do the same, and start the push for a decision by saying “it sounds like it’s time for us to make a decision” — not even making the decision yourself unless absolutely necessary.
If you want to have a team and not a group of individuals, you have to get them solving problems together. That means not answering questions off the cuff, holding back your voice (you will be the loudest in the room if you speak), and posing questions to the group. I share the problems I’m thinking about as often as possible, so that they can be in the back of my team’s head while they go about their days.
You want the answer to your next problem to be able to come from anywhere (like a chef in Ratatouille), which means sharing as much information as you can and getting people in the habit of answering themselves.