👋 Good Morfternight, this is Paolo with the 112th edition of our newsletter on Product, Leadership, and Technology.
Over 8,500 people read it every week. I hope you’ll join us for today’s read.
Here’s a quick recap of the three tips I shared: ✍️
- Promote Writing: Set the standard by replacing meetings with written notes. Encourage your team to do the same.
- Use Collaboration Tools that Prioritize Writing: Select tools and establish rituals that support written communication to make information accessible and organized.
- Foster a Culture of Feedback and Improvement: Encourage documenting feedback and mistakes to enhance growth and transparency.
An effective writing culture provides clear, accessible documentation of expectations, decisions, and processes, enhancing accountability and clarity. This enables team members to gain autonomy and ownership in their work.
That’s today’s topic:
Autonomy is the most critical characteristic of successful teams.
The role of autonomy in team success
Autonomy and ownership involve granting team members the freedom and responsibility to make decisions and take action.
Peter Drucker shares Alfred Sloan’s thoughts on authority and responsibility in Adventures of a Bystander:
Authority without responsibility is illegitimate; but so is responsibility without authority. Both lead to tyranny.
Alfred Sloan
Based on the above excerpt, one can evaluate a team’s success based on the outcomes of their actions if, and only if, one first puts the team in a position to decide their course of action.
That’s the definition of autonomy.
My approach
Promoting autonomy and ownership in a team can be challenging. It becomes more manageable with the implementation of asynchronous workflows and a strong writing culture, which allow for more flexible and independent operations.
Here are some of my tips:
🧘🏻♂️ Embrace the flexibility and autonomy that comes with a distributed team. This allows team members to work from any location and at times that fit their personal schedules, promoting work-life balance.
🪞 Foster a culture of transparency and open communication. Using tools like async daily stand-ups and open Slack channels, open communication builds trust and ensures that everyone is informed and aligned with the team’s goals.
🔍 Take advantage of the diversity of perspectives and experiences. By leveraging varied backgrounds, teams with diverse perspectives can offer unique insights and solutions to problems.
Through these principles, structured brainstorming sessions, and inclusive decision-making processes, every team member can feel valued and encouraged to share their ideas.
These practices are crucial for understanding and penetrating different markets or collecting cultural insights from their respective regions.
Also, don’t underestimate the benefits of teams working across time zones; if done efficiently, work is handed over from one team to the next as the Earth spins, with, as a result, increased velocity and better documentation.
How should you measure the performance of a team?
Input, output, outcomes. Pick one.
1. Input, or time spent working
Input is a flawed metric.
Hourly wages have been the standard since the Industrial Revolution, making time spent working the key factor in evaluating performance. However, this method is outdated and counterproductive, especially in service industries where it creates a conflict of interest between maximizing billable hours and delivering quick service.
The simplicity of input-based metrics appeals to poor managers who prefer easy-to-measure metrics over understanding the actual work. This approach discourages productivity and learning, especially for new employees, and results in a race to the bottom where employees do the bare minimum to avoid getting fired.
2. Output, or amount of work done.
Output is a vanity metric.
Measuring value by the amount of work done focuses on the number of things produced, not time spent working. This method incentivizes efficiency, but often leads to focusing on the wrong metrics.
While it may lower the onboarding barrier for junior employees and motivate those seeking more agency, producing more does not equate to creating value.
True value lies in solving problems for people.
Ultimately, while output is a better metric than input, it is still a first-order measure that doesn’t fully capture value creation. This intermediate metric incentivizes productivity, but frequently focuses on quantity over quality. It might even earn you a minivan…
3. Outcome, or impact on customers.
Impact is a hard metric to measure.
Measuring outcomes is crucial because it highlights the value of solving user problems rather than just the volume of work. This requires deep knowledge of your customers, access to behavior data, and the ability to link your actions to their results. While it’s more challenging to measure outcomes than outputs, the rewards are significant.
Tracking outcomes means success is gauged by user satisfaction, new sales, or returning customers. The focus shifts to what the team works on, rather than how much or how fast they work.
Focusing on outcomes is harder because the feedback loops are longer, so one must accelerate the pace of iteration, the speed, and the compounding factor of learning.
How should you measure individual performance?
There is always a risk, even in a high-performing team, of individuals performing at different levels.
Because we focus on outcomes, not input or output, it is much harder to discern each person’s contributions to the collective result. After all, you can’t simply count lines of code. Some highly valuable people play a critical role in enabling others to improve their craft. Others, equally valuable, facilitate communication and connections with other teams. The group’s results wouldn’t be as positive if everyone focused solely on the code.
This is why it is critical to keep teams relatively small. This way, their lead doesn’t have to spend 100% of their time on management or administrative tasks and can stay involved in the team’s work.
Within any team, members know perfectly well who is a high performer and who is just tagging along. By staying highly involved with the team’s work, the lead remains part of it and aware of each member’s contributions, rather than risking losing touch by operating at a higher abstraction level.
FAQ
Q: How do I get to trust my team members?
A: Trust is not earned but given. Offer trust upfront and verify. Allow your team members to make mistakes and learn from them.
Q: How can I manage a team when everyone works on their own schedule?
A: Project management tools can help track progress and stay organized. As a team lead, it’s your job to choose the best tool, master it, and onboard your team.
Q: I have a fear of delegating tasks and losing control. What should I do?
A: Delegating may be difficult, but it’s essential. Encourage your team members to take the initiative, lead projects, and accept new responsibilities. Do it even when you don’t feel like it.
Meanwhile, in Vienna…
Beyond Product, Leadership, and Technology, I enjoy B&W photography.
Here is a picture I took recently in Vienna for my upcoming series “Walk”.
→ Add me on LinkedIn
Until we meet again…
Thank you for being a Morfternighter. If someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe. I also write and publish my photos on paolo.blog.
Cheers,
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