As mentioned in my opening blog post, I am currently running two teams at KOHO, and to be completely honest, I have found this to be more challenging than expected. Currently, I have around 13 direct reports over the two teams plus a few additional people that I meet with regularly as part of the work I do. From this two major themes have come up.
I’m not tired. No, wait, I am suuuuuuper tired…
The first major thing that came up was my own exhaustion. The most surprising part of running two teams directly was how many meetings that would involve. I have approximately twenty 1:1’s every week which is ten hours of just person to person meetings. It is important to call out here, I like people. Legitimately, I enjoy meeting and talking to people, learning about their lives, and telling them too much about mine. The surprising downside to this is that I am investing emotionally into all of these meetings and that is leaving me with very little in the rest of my life.
When I had less direct reports this was not a problem as I had more than enough energy to go around, but that definitely has a wall that prevents infinite scale. That also is not entirely fair to those people on these teams. I want to give each of them my full focus and attention and I need to be able to advocate earnestly for these people. I think I was supplying this, but at the cost of basically turning my brain off in my personal life.
Adventure (in making) Time!
In additon to being tired, I also actually had very little time to give to my teams. On top of having the ten hours of just 1:1s, each team comes with its set of weekly meetings. This is especially true for my enterprise team where we have regular meetings with our partners. There were definitely some weeks where the only time I had to do actual work was during my evenings and weekends. Obviously unsustainable, and also not something KOHO wanted me to do.
Often I would just block out time that was available into a focus block just to have something, but a lot of my week was broken up into 30m to 1h long chunks. Day to day stuff fills that pretty quickly. Also, we all know how hard is to actually get real work done in those 30m increments.
Well that all sounds like a bummer.
This may seem kind of doom and gloom, but I had two things going for me, I am extremely good-looking, and I had support.
One of those is true.
It was the support, I had a lot of support.
Thank goodness I am so attractive
Something that I have struggled with throughout my entire career is delegating, and becoming a manager did not make that bad habit disappear, it just made it sneakier. Rather than tickets that can pile up if you don’t delegate, meetings make sense as a manager. Of course I need to be in the meeting, it is for my team! I am unblocking my devs so they can work! These are true, to an extent.
The truth of this was not I was not effectively helping the team or unblocking them, if anything I was hindering them. I had to do the hardest thing I have ever had to do professionally. Let someone else take over some of my team tasks.
Obviously joking, but it was something hard to do. I want to be able to do it all, and I want to show I can excel in my role. It just turns out that excelling here meant lifting someone else up. I mentioned above that I had support (and that am extremely good looking), that support was the people on the teams that I was trying to protect and my own manager. Once I reached the point and knew I needed to spread this work around I knew who I would have help me, one of my senior devs who I regularly collaborated with on work for the team.
First, of course, I made sure this was something they were looking to do. Management is not for everyone, and I didn’t want to force them into anything they weren’t interested in. Luckily, they were interested in giving it a shot. We had a conversation around where they could help alleviate some of my burden and we decided to start with sprint planning.
We discussed current team goals, future projects, and what improvements could be done, then I let them make and run our sprint.
Watching that fist spring planning happen with someone else at the head was an extremely eye opening experience. It was like I was in a dark room and someone flicked on the light. The sprint already was well understood and the tasks that needed doing were explained and handed out. Questions were fielded, ideas were shared, it was wonderful.
I realized then that I had been doing this all wrong, the team deserved someone who could dedicate the time needed to properly plan, to be available to answer questions. It allowed them to continue the colloborative environment that had been the norm when I had more time.
Beyond the immediate team benefits, it also re-energized me. I felt the weariness fade away since I now had someone to work with on these tasks, I had support!
Since having my direct report help me, I have found myself in a better mood and more engaged in work. I even had the energy to start my blog! I cannot stress enough that superman only exists in comics, and long term a single person being what keeps a team performant is terrible for the company.
My original team was now stronger for having multiple leaders and the work being spread around. As an added bonus, since I was able to identify a leader within the team that existed, I have an extremely high confidence that all the good things that made that team awesome will continue. Much better than bringing in someone new which can potentially disrupt the teams process.
All in all, this was a growth moment for me, and growth is exciting!
Post Cover Image from: Diego PH