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It ensures you’re staying close to the vision, identifying areas for improvement, and driving faster, more informed decisions.
When I started Piece of Cake Moving in 2018, we had three employees. As the founder, I was involved in building every department. Although we’ve grown significantly since then, I still believe in being across every part of the company. As a founder, staying involved ensures you’re staying true to the vision. It also builds a deeper understanding of how every department operates, helps identify areas for improvement, and leads to faster, more informed decisions.
Balancing micromanaging and managing by absence
Managing by absence leaves tremendous room for error. This happens because you’re setting a general direction then allowing the team to follow their own course. Working closely with your team can help employees in the early stages of a new role or project succeed. It ensures that your team will understand what needs to be done and will be better equipped to achieve it.
At Piece of Cake, when there’s a new manager, they submit a report at the end of each day. The report details what they worked on, what they accomplished, and their feedback and ideas. The manager can use the report to share their ideas daily. This tool also empowers founders to see how a senior team member is spending their time and how they think.
As they grow into that role, I slowly step away. However, I still check in with direct reports once a week. I always leave time for them to bring up ideas. The more open communication there is, the more likely the team is to share feedback and their thoughts on ways to improve the business.
Course correct and make improvements faster
When you’re not across every department, it makes it difficult to fix issues and make improvements. If you stay close to the product, customer service, and sales team, especially early on, then there’s a tremendous opportunity to identify issues as they arise. You are also able to make the experience better constantly. If you’re so far removed, it takes a significant amount of time to learn about issues and what caused them. It also delays the process of coming up with a solution. Moreover, the solution might be wrong because you don’t have proper context with your team. It almost makes things worse than being involved from the beginning.
For example, during our early years, the company had an issue with the call abandonment rate, which was increasing by 10 percent, and the customer wait time, which was increasing by 125 percent. I hadn’t checked in with the customer service team leaders for months because I had fully delegated the work.
Once the issue arose, I realized I needed to work with the team much more closely to find a solution. I decided we needed to hire more people. However, if I had been more involved with the team, I would have known the core of the issue was that client calls were being transferred between departments, causing inefficiency and extending the get-to-solution time. My team implemented a solution. The lesson was you can let your team do what they do best, but still be involved and act as a resource to troubleshoot when needed.
Staying true to the company’s vision
The founder knows the company’s vision best. After you set the vision, there’s accountability in ensuring the business and teams continue to be aligned with that vision. If you’re not involved in every department, it is very difficult to communicate it. It is also easy for team leaders to unintentionally move away from it. The vision is key to how the team engages with customers. So it’s critical to make sure it’s clear across the company.
Piece of Cake’s vision is to excel at customer service, build future leaders, and care for our employees’ well-being. During periods of rapid growth, the team unintentionally moved away from two of these pillars to keep the pace. When that happened, I realized I was not involved enough with certain departments or that I was unintentionally managing by absence. It’s a great reminder to never be too hands off. Every opportunity is a reminder of not only your company goals for growth and revenue, but of its core vision and principles.
This post originally appeared at inc.com.