My 16 Rules for Managing a Small Team

Delegation is hard and management is harder and nobody talks about it. Why, I don't know. But as somebody who has gone from, you know, managing teams in college and small jobs off to the side to running a small team and owning her own business, management and figuring out people has by far been my biggest challenge. I have not gotten it all figured out, but I have made it a lot easier for myself by picking up along the way what I like to call rules for managing a small team. My rules manifest in the policies and procedures I build for the business. The different things I make. Habits for myself are the manifestation of rules. But the rules themselves don't just come from the pie in the sky or some random person on the Internet that you shouldn't listen to. Instead, it comes from a belief that delegation is not a triangle, it's an inverse triangle. When I first started delegating, I heard a lot of people describe management as, as this, where you are on the top, you have tasks that need to be done or things that need to be accomplished. You push them down to subordinates who help you bring those plans to life. And this is kind of the picture I had in my head. But somewhere along the line I was exposed to the concept of servant leadership. The idea that the leader of a business, the CEO in a traditional work chart, is actually on the bottom. And when I applied that framework to delegation and management, all of a sudden everything made a lot more sense. And it's the basis on which these 15 rules, 16 rules are create. With servant leadership and this kind of model, I'm thinking about delegation as a push up. Okay, so I'm down here, I'm looking to get help from maybe these three different circles up here. If I want to get help on tasks or responsibilities, I can't just let go of that responsibility and trust that it will trickle downhill until it reaches somebody else below me. No, in this model, when it comes to delegation and management, the way I can make that happen is by lifting up that wait until somebody else above me can grab it, or if I have a really proactive person on my team, perhaps they can reach down and grab tasks off my plate. So rather than having gravity just result in tasks being moved down the organization, I just let go of things and they'll get done for me. Yeah, instead of that, we use effort. Effort is required to have delegation and successful managerial relationships. And this belief is what fundamentally guides the 16 rules I'm going to go through in this video. I and by the way, I'm sharing these 16 rules as my own personal rules of what works well for me. I am not some kind of leadership or coaching expert. I just want to share what I found to be helpful because I really wish other folks have shared this during their journey because I probably would have saved myself a lot of stupid mistakes. And don't worry, none of my rules involve things like making yourself into an extrovert when you're not just liking people more, spending more money and people will manage themselves. Or you know my favorite one? Don't be an asshole. Which is like yeah, I get it, but how do you even understand if you're being an asshole if you don't know how to manage? Not the most helpful advice. So I'll be breaking down my 16 rules into don'ts and do's and let's just start right now. Rule number one, don't view your job as being the person who has to explain things and solve problems. I made that mistake very early on and for a long period of time because when you first start hiring, you're usually hiring junior level roles and you do need to be this teacher and explainer. But as you transition to the team that you should have, this behavior needs to stop and it is a hard habit to break. Instead, my rule for management is to make sure you get really good at asking questions. Like really good. If someone on your team comes to you and says oh my gosh, I'm stuck on this client question, you need to know how to respond to that challenge and not just solve the problem for them. One of my favorite questions I keep in my back pocket to make sure that when these kinds of situations happen, even if I don't know what to say, I have a question to kind of push the onus back to the person. Is the question can you tell me more about that or why do you think that is? Both of these questions are just open ended catch alls you can use in any scenario to encourage the other person to give you more context or to do some critical thinking for themselves. Rule number two, Acting like an independent contributor. And I see if you view yourself as somebody whose main job is to get work done, I think that's a really great shortcut to make sure you're a shitty manager. Because yes, oftentimes if you are a management position, you also have to get work done. For example, right here I am the person on this team who films these videos. I need to get this done. And lately it's been a bit of a pinch. You see, I view the way I spend my time in two Major categories. It's either on the business or in the business. And I know people use those phrases a lot, but it's often unclear what that means. A good metaphor for this would be, imagine that your business is a greenhouse. Working on the business would be setting up that greenhouse, getting the ventilation better, fixing the panels that are broken, making sure that front door latches, working on the overall container where all the plants are thriving. Meanwhile, working in the business would be actually being a plant in that greenhouse. Okay. Actually working on the different pieces and making sure that your things are growing. That would be in the business behavior. I view those as my two main categories. And when you're an independent contributor, just a team member who's doing their thing, your focus is getting those plants to grow. But when you shift to a manager, your job is not just to grow plants, it's to build the environment where many plants can grow, where systems and processes can take over, and everyone's set up for success. Even though right now, my business, I am the only person filming these YouTube videos. This is an important obligation I do every single week. It's super important to the business success and everything. But if I have a team member coming up to me saying they're having a crisis in their house, they need to take the day off because their little one's sick, you can bet that I'm going to postpone my YouTube filming to make sure I can cover for them or that someone can cover for them while they're out of the office. Because to me, working on the machine, supporting the people and the culture you're building is way more important than then any tasks you do that are execution oriented, even if those execution tasks are really, really important to the business or to the team. By the way, if you put yourself in the situation I described here, and you picture someone on your team messaging you, saying, oh my gosh, I'm going to be out for a whole week, I need to go handle this thing. If you don't know how your team would be able to manage that, how you would figure out what they needed to do, how you would get their work done, how they do their work to make sure that you can cover for them, it's might be a sign that you need some more processes and systems in your business. And I know that's a cliche thing that so many people talk about. You need processes and systems. What does that mean? Candidly, that's always bothered me too. And that's why at ProcessDriven, we've actually set out to construct exactly what it means to have a systemized business. What are the things you need? How are they organized? What do you do first, what do you do next? How can you bring everything together? And if that's something your team doesn't have and you would be interesting in adding into it, you should consider working with us here at ProcessDriven. Our main training program, ProcessDriven Foundation Foundations, will guide you and your team through the step by step of each piece you need to have in order to have a process driven foundation of your business. Yes, the name Process Driven Foundations is not that original. You can find the details for this program in the description below. But if you'd like to kind of assess, hmm, is this the right fit for me? I'm also going to share in the description below this little assessment that we've put together here at ProcessDriven. It's called the Systemization Snapshot. We created it here and it's basically a free operations audit where you can answer some questions and it will help you evaluate how, how systemized is your team really. So you can check that out for free in the description below. With that, let's get back to our next don't, which is don't bash meetings unilaterally. Maybe this is just me, but when I became a manager slash leader, I immediately kind of took to task my hatred of meetings. I hated meetings, I hated sitting in them. They often felt useless when I was on a team. And so when I was running a team I was like, hell no, we're not going to have tons of meetings all the time. I just, I didn't want that. But here's the thing. No meetings, especially when you are in a remote team, essentially equates to having no culture. Because meetings are one of the best tools we have in our pocket to build culture in a remote environment or really in any team, that's where we come together and make it clear what's important, what's not important, who's winning, who's losing. These things that really help create connections between people, celebrations, motivation, all of these tools that we need at our disposal as a manager, they're created often in meetings or in other group interactions. And if we just cancel meetings unilaterally, well, you're going to have a bad time. So instead of this, my do is to make sure that you do prioritize creating meetings that have value. That's very clear to everybody there. If you or your team ever dread going to a meeting or they tell you, hey, this doesn't really feel like It's a good thing for my time. Feel free to reevaluate. But don't just scrap it all and say, well, because that meeting didn't feel productive, we're never going to meet again because you're shooting yourself in the foot and ruining one of the best tools you have as a manager to really set out alignment and purpose. Fun fact. I've actually noticed that meetings are most useful when it comes to non work talk, non work connections. So icebreakers and those kinds of things where you're celebrating wins and highs and lows. That to me has proven to be the most valuable component of any meetings and the only thing I would absolutely never cut. Meanwhile, discussing issues and problems, problem solving, which a lot of people use meetings for, is actually something you can take offline pretty easily. So just wish my past self had known that and sharing that with you, in case you haven't experienced that yet. Next up, don't assume that hands off management is going to work for all people. In fact, it works for a very, very slim minority of people. If you are going to give people a task, in most cases, just giving them the task and walking away is not going to set them up for success. In fact, I've experienced this and learned this the hard way, Layla, from the past. Why didn't you, you know this. But I have on many occasions given people areas of responsibility or projects or tasks and said here, full autonomy work on this project. And you know, because that's what I would want as an employee. But these team members were not wired the same way I was. They saw this project that they had complete freedom to do. I wasn't going to be involved in anything unless there was a problem. And that freedom caused mayhem. Those team members could have had so much success. They had the capability of getting the work done, but because they didn't have enough structure, they got paralyzed, procrastinated. They didn't get the project done on time or in many cases at all. It just became this overwhelming paralysis. And then it would often turn around and say, well, you didn't support me enough. And I'd be sitting there thinking, but I thought autonomy was good. I was a fool. Instead of assuming that everybody wants autonomy because that's what you would want, the better way of doing this is to understand there is a spectrum of delegation levels. You can be really detailed, you can be really hands off. And for very few people, do you want to be fully hands off or fully hands on? Very, very few people. For most people, you're going to be Somewhere in the middle where you're communicating the end result, maybe a few key steps to get there. Maybe you're checking in at the one month and the two month mark. By dialing this delegation complexity to what the actual person is ready for, capable of, and likes to experience, you're going to set up both parties for less disappointment, less frustration, and a more successful project. And unfortunately for many people, the fully autonomous way of delegation is just not going to work. For the next rule I have is to balance my feedback. Whenever I'm giving feedback on something, unless it is abhorrently terrible and it's just, you know, this is not going to work. We want to sprinkle in feedback of both sides. If you're in charge of, say, proofreading a newsletter that someone wrote, you are going to be going through and revising sentences and making changes. But take the extra 20 seconds to also circle the things that are really good, the really good subject line, the great way they signed off, the attention to detail around UTM links, whatever is good. Take the time to highlight that my goal is always at least one one positive thing for every four negative things. If it is, you know, a feedback thing where your whole job is to be negative, always sprinkle in that positive component as well. Another process I use to make sure I am balancing in the positive is a weekly routine. It's called something like fill in personnel files and it basically pops up every week. And it just prompts me to say, hey, did anything good or anything bad happen with this team member this week? If so, add an entry into their personnel file, which is just a spreadsheet I maintain, with kind of a log of information about each person on the team. The reason I love this is because when things go terribly wrong, like so many examples, I don't want to necessarily give in this video and someone, you know, has a behavior incident and something like that, I remember immediately to put it in their personnel file because it's so bad I'm like, oh my goodness, we need to log this as a disciplinary action, all this other stuff. But when something's good or when nothing's drama filled, it is really easy to forget to log that in someone's personnel file. So you end up with a personnel file that's only logging bad things. And that's not very helpful for performance feedback or to evaluate someone's contributions to the team. So this routine really helps me keep the positive front of mind proactively every week. My next rule is don't rely on self reporting exclusively sure, trust people, trust what they say. But take a moment to double check things, particularly if somebody is new to the position that you've put them in. For example, if somebody says they are so swamped, they're so busy, everything's so stressful, take a moment to confirm that they're actually working, you know, a full time schedule. We've had situations where people are in that mode, but we find out that they're only working half of the week and then the stress actually comes from them working half a week when they're supposed to be working full time and not verifying. This not a good thing to do. Checking time tracking and project progress proactively in addition to listening to what people are telling you and trying to trust their feedback is a good balancing act to just make sure you don't end up in the situation I was where you're maybe lied to for over a month and you just didn't think to check and you know, lesson learned the hard way. My next rule is don't speak negatively in public rather than, you know, pointing out that Suzy messed up this email in the ALTI meeting. Pull Susie aside and talk about that in your one on one in the meeting. Focus on positive things or maybe team wide feedback that's either negative or positive. This applies to all sorts of topics, but I do have one little exception that me being a little cheeky still believes in, which is my exception to this rule is easy if the thing that you're speaking negatively about is a common enemy. You see, a common enemy for your team could be something that you're all fighting against. You're fighting against overpriced software, you're fighting against the old way of doing things. And if you want to speak negatively about that in a team environment, that's actually going to be great. It's going to bring your team closer together and it's just a little bit of fun to like bash on. Ah, I can't believe they did that again. I mean, camaraderie comes in all sorts of forms. Next rule, don't expect to be treated the way that you treat other people. You gotta go into this position with some thick skin. Understand that you are gonna be criticized in public even though you don't do that to other people. You are gonna receive only negative feedback even though you don't do that to other people. When you give a recommendation on LinkedIn, people are not gonna return the favor. There's just that power dynamic that comes with being in charge that people think ah, they don't need it. They're in charge. That's their payment. I don't need to return these favors. And that's just kind of the nature of leadership and management. I remember I was watching the show Tokyo Vice. If you've seen that on hbo and like two months into this person owning this shop, there, her employees were throwing her a surprise party to say thank you so much for all that you do. And I remember sitting there with my husband watching the show being like, that's how you know whoever wrote this show is not actually a business owner because management is often viewed to be compensated just by the power. That's your compensation. So to have a thank you party two months into managing your company? Yeah, I, I don't think so. I'm six and a half years in and I'll let you know if that ever happens, but I don't expect it to, and that's totally okay. Instead of being hurt or bothered by this, just get used to it, you know, get used to taking the blame for things that aren't your fault and get used to giving away credit for literally everything. You know, you could write 95% of an email, but if one team member wrote the other 5%, just give them full credit for writing that email. That's just the way it goes in this position. And something that I wish I would have known earlier on, it probably would have made me a lot happier in the position. My next rule is don't try to be relatable. Um, I think early on, especially in my journey, I would really try to, I don't know, find things in common with my team members and bond with them with that as I would if I was a peer on the team. And that's just not helpful. You are in the position of leadership and management, hopefully because you are different in some way. You have some kind of complementary strength. And what I've come to realize over the last six plus years in this particular position is you got to lean into that. Just be weird. Just embrace the unique things that got you into the position you are. And leaning into those differences will actually inspire trust and loyalty in a much more healthy way than trying to lean into some of the personal differences or to simplify your personality to be more familiar to the person you're talking with. A great environment for where you can highlight these differences in this uniqueness and build this inspiration and trust is one on one meetings with your direct report, which is the one meeting at ProcessDriven I will almost never cancel. Even if life gets busy because it is the best meeting you can have for making sure your team is actually gelling through the strength of those one on one relationships. I actually have a whole video where I go through the meeting agendas and cadence that we use here at Process Driven. In case you want to steal it, it's up here in this video. Rule number two, don't trust your memory. Instead, write everything down. You are not needing to just manage your own work, but also make sure you are supporting the work of many, many other people. Your brain is not big enough to remember all of those details. Make a habit of writing things down, especially if you are trying to encourage behavior change. For example, if you want to hold somebody accountable to saying, hey, I'm going to make sure I'm working 40 hours a week next week. Great. In your next one on one meeting, add a bullet point today, a week early to say, make sure we talk about your work schedule to check in on the progress. These kinds of reminders and notes to yourself makes holding people accountable a whole lot easier, which is one of the most important parts of your job and makes sure that your brain doesn't explode with all the things you're just supposed to memorize. Next rule. Remove common sense from your dictionary because there's no such thing. Common sense is not common. It's just what you think is normal based on your upbringing, based on your job experience, based on your knowledge. And to assume that somebody else is going to have the exact same wiring and view something as common sense is kind of just arrogant. Remove that from your dictionary. Instead. You really need to focus on communication and making sure that you're communicating at a level that people understand what the desired behavior is. I know in my own experience I have had times where I'm just like, you know, that's common sense. Why didn't they just do that? But the reason somebody didn't do the thing I thought they should just do is often because someone is lacking context. They don't know the key metrics that I view to be important in that project. They don't know the end state I'm hoping that project will accomplish. They don't have the vision of where we're going because I haven't communicated it. All of these pieces of context are floating around in the business owner or the manager's brain because you've been in that strategy call, but they maybe haven't. And it is our job to communicate that. And the only way you can communicate that is removing words like common sense from your dictionary and replacing it with context you know, why didn't they have the context to do this thing? Why didn't they have the context to solve this problem? It's not common sense, it's context. And it's something that you can and should be filling in. Next rule, as a manager, you don't want to be in the habit of creating and ideating. Brainstorming and generating ideas and creations is something you can do, but not with your manager hat on. As a manager, your job primarily is to improve and remind. So you want to hold people accountable and you want to find opportunities to make things a little bit better. But holding yourself to that kind of enablement position, make sure that you're making your team the stars of the show. If you start going into superhero mode of I'm going to create something totally new and ideate, you're adding more work, you're not making work easier, and you're becoming the superhero, charging off into the sunset instead, whenever you have that management hat on for an hour a day, two hours a day, your whole day, whatever that is, focus on really making things better, making things easier, making things clearer, and holding people to account for the ways they're going to do that same work. The next one is actually one that I picked up from an economics class in college. My favorite professor used to say, equality is not equity. And I want to break that down here because it relates to your team. You don't want to treat your team equally, everybody the exact same way, because treating everybody the exact same way is probably going to guarantee that the majority of people are unique, happy. Instead, you want to treat people equitably. Equitably refers to being fair, while equally suggest equal proportions for each person. Sometimes the fair thing to do would actually be to give some people more support and some people less support. You don't want to treat everybody the same way. You want to be like Jane Goodall. You want to observe behaviors of your team. You know, what people skills are, what their values are, what motivates them, what communication best works for them. Do they brainstorm well in a group? Do they prefer to have time to think about things? Do they like an agenda in advance? Would they rather improvise? Would they rather have a call? Would they rather have a video chat? All of these things are behaviors and preferences that you need to understand about your team members by listening really well and asking good questions. And then use that to treat people equitably in the way that's going to set them up best for success, even if it's entirely different than how you would treat somebody else on the team. A great place to demonstrate this would be in your one on one meetings. Here at ProcessDriven, I try to remind every person I'm working with that their one on one meeting is their time. There's one or two things I always want to cover, things like feedback and, you know, challenges. But if they want to have the call at 7am or 5pm, or if they want to have the call and focus in on their career growth as opposed to day to day work, whatever their focus is, whatever they want to hit on in that one on one, I try to really make it clear that that meeting is theirs. And I will say the people I meet with right now, every single one on one meeting, they don't follow the same agenda, they don't feel the same, they don't run the same way. And I think that's a good thing as you're trying to serve the way people need to be served. My next tip is to not expect people to tell you when something is wrong, especially if they have a solution for it. For example, someone on your team might say, hey, I'm really stressed out. I want to take some time off at the end of this month to just take some time to decompress instead of just taking that at face value. My response in those situations, knowing what I know now, would be to trust the emotion that someone conveys. Like in this case, they're feeling really stressed, but maybe challenge or just kind of poke a little bit to confirm that the solution that they want is truly the right solution. So in this instance, I might ask, ask why do you want to take time off at the end of the month if you're stressed out now, or is that the best solution for you? Those types of questions are just going to allow you to probe a little bit deeper and make sure that people are not self filtering what they tell you. Because candidly, most people, particularly folks who were socialized as a female, are going to sugarcoat and hold back and restrain themselves and give to you not what they want, but what they think that they can have. And that can sometimes cause more harm than good. My next rule of management is to not create walls. Rather than viewing yourself as a manager of building this room for the elite, your corner office of knowledge, try to share as much as you can. There's very little as a manager that you don't want to have shared with your team, especially if your team is a little bit more mature, like you're not working with teenagers at the Ice cream shop. You can share a lot of information with these adults to help them understand the circumstances. The only exceptions to the transparency guideline I would put here are things like personnel and performance information. I would never share if somebody on the team struggling in an area or on a performance plan, unless you know that circumstance impacted another person. And another thing might be in financially insecure times or in other areas that could be triggers to people. You might want to just check before you share to say, hey, I'm going to be sharing this. If you're not interested in learning about this or this is going to stress you out, that's okay. Skip out on this section. This is actually why at ProcessDriven we practice pay transparency. Because I think finances are a really important thing for everybody to understand. So everyone, our team, when they join, they get added into a spreadsheet that's shared with the whole team that shows exactly how much everybody is making, what their benefits are. You know, all of this other stuff in one spreadsheet that everybody on the team can see. My last rule is actually one that I'm going to name based on a term that I learned from a former team member, Carly, who described it as honor student syndrome. And basically, this rule is about not expecting that just because you follow these rules and you try your best and you work really hard that things are going to go well. It sounds a little bit sad to say this, but I don't mean it in a depressing way. I just think when you get into a management position and you're surrounding yourself with humans who are unpredictable and you need to support even though that's going to look different every single day, even if you follow all of these rules and you try your best and you have the best of intentions, you will do the wrong thing, you will hire the wrong people, you will mess up a disciplinary conversation, you will screw up. And that's just a reality that you can't beat yourself up on. You just need to understand it's going to happen in the same way that everyone on your team at some point or another is to mess up. It's just going to happen. So the way to counteract this, and the thing I wish I knew six years ago, is despite that, you need to fully believe that you and the people around you can make things right. This rule sounds so simple when I'm saying it abstractly in this video, but in those moments where you realize, oh my God, I hired a monster, like, this is the worst person on our team. How did they get through our Screening. Oh, my gosh, how are we going to get out of this? Or you find out that someone is stealing from you or that they were conducting employment fraud. I mean, all of these things have happened to me. And I remember especially early on that it would just break me down. I would just be like, how did I let this happen? Why didn't I get this right? And it would just hurt. It would be like a sucker punch. And recognizing now that it's not about the strength to never have a mistake, it's about the strength to get through the mistake, it really. It really helped me, and maybe it'll help you as well. One tool that I've used to really make this more okay for me is actually starting to do quarterly journals. And not the kind that you're thinking of, more of a video journal. And I actually publish it here on YouTube every single quarter. It's called Layla's. Look back, you can find it up here on this playlist. This journal process allows me time to reflect and learn on the areas where things didn't go so well and give myself some grace to say, all right, that didn't work. That's okay. I am telling everybody publicly on the Internet that I totally screwed this up. Up. And with that, I'm going to get stronger with this muscle and get more and more used to it. So I don't know if that's something you might want to try out, maybe just a written journal or something with your team, but it's really been helpful to me. So, to review, these are the 15. No, 16. Why do I keep doing that? The 16 rules that I look at when I am trying to delegate up in my organization, when I realize things are going to be hard, it's because they're supposed to be hard. That's what delegation is. It's work. It's not just gravity. It's your effort, it's your care, it's your time and attention that allows you to build a team that has layers and layers and layers of support, all based on the effort and intention that you can put or pull into that business. Right now at ProcessDriven, I'm actually getting ready to work on a project that's actually going to force me to improve my delegation and management skills. Even more learning from some of the experts we have in our community. So I wanted to make this video to just kind of capture a moment in time of. These are the rules I have right now, and I'd love to hear what you'd add to this, because I'm hoping maybe in a year, in two years, we can come back and do an update to this video of some of the things I've learned. You know, year seven year eight into management these 16 rules capture my values around managing a team right now, today. But by building out processes and systems in your business, you can institutionalize the values that are important to you and your team. And if you need help doing that, you're not sure how to start building systems and processes, check out the link in the description below for our ProcessDriven Foundations program. But if you're not quite ready for process driven validations, but you still want to make sure you are managing your small team effectively, a great starting point would be defining the roles and responsibilities on your team. We have more of that on this video here on the end screen. My name's Layla. I'm the owner here at ProcessDriven, where we're trying to pioneer the way for small teams to be sustainable and systemized at the same time, without dusty policy binders or tons of bureaucracy. If you enjoy this content, would like to see more, please do like and subscribe. And until next time, remember to enjoy the process.