Handling Chaos and Managing Expectation (a lesson in managing startup)
We require leadership the most during periods of confusion.
Like a weightlifter wanting to add more weight to his/her routine, a company needs to strengthen its core before scaling up, and this was lacking in LandX.
LandX, which is initially being run by less than 10 people, had a serious fundamental flaw, communication. Being a small company, this is an issue we do not see yet.
As the company grows in sales, we hire more people to sustain the growth and it keeps getting bigger, so do the cracks in our foundation. Nobody knows what others are doing, so everybody had to guess each others’ progress. This is troublesome to a point where sometimes, nobody knows who’s in charge of each task.
If we don’t fix this before we scale even bigger, we might be in serious trouble in the future. Unfortunately, there’s no easy fix to this, you can’t pour more money (by hiring more people) hoping it can fix itself.
So, what did we do?
Fix Communication
Initially, it’s hard to get people to assign tasks or report their progress with the provided platform (Trello). These people, which some people call the Luddites are more comfortable assigning tasks dan update their progress in the division’s chat group, making it hard for anyone who’s not in the group to be aware of what they’re doing. This is a huge issue in cross-divisional collaboration work.
How it is fixed:
- We ask for all employees to explain their plan,
- we enforced a new rule, “if the task is not given in Trello card, ignore it” and start making all assignees update there,
- Weekly catchup meeting for deeper understanding.
Scale of Priority
“If everything is important, then nothing is.” — Patrick Lencioni
The engineering team wants to increase resources to develop better technology, while the marketing team wants to use those same resources to attract more customers. Meanwhile, the finance, operations and customer support departments each have their own set of priorities and goals.
We do not have enough resources to treat everyone’s priorities equally (which we did, and it’s causing our engineering team to be overloaded). We do it more often than we’d like to admit, and it’s because we don’t prioritize properly.
When we set goals for the company, we usually start by listing everything we want to improve on and then stop. Sure, we may begin working on the first item on the list that we believe is the most important at the time, but because that priority was set arbitrarily based on a hunch, we will end up dropping it the following week or month for something we believe is more important.
This problem has a relatively simple solution. First, we must recognize that if everything is important, then nothing is, and then prioritize accordingly. Once we get past this notion, we’ll have a better idea of what we should be working on.
Finishing big tasks are time-consuming, we have to choose the one that makes the most sense and devote our entire effort to it. Once we’ve finished that one, move on to the next.
I hope you find this useful. If you think my article can be helpful to your friends, please consider sharing it with them. I would really appreciate it. Thank you for reading.
