David Ledgerwood
As an entrepreneur and a consultant, I’m pretty much always working on a set of critical deadlines for one of my businesses, or the business of one of my clients. I don’t treat them in the same way. In fact, I often treat my clients’ businesses better than I treat mine. That’s not the best admission, but it’s a classic indication of the proverbial “cobbler’s kids have no shoes.”
If I can put in extra effort to drive something home for a client I’m going to do that. The good part is that I’m pretty much always treating my business partners in my own startups like they are my clients, so it all comes out in the wash. At the same time I’d always advise my coaching and mentoring clients to apply the “oxygen mask principle” to themselves, which is to say act like you are on a crashing plane and put your own mask on first so you can help others.
Excessive preambles aside, there are some common principles that I institute in every project that have become my go-to practices. Having developed these patterns I’ve created a blueprint that works for me, operates efficiently, and gets good to better results.
- Get out of email. There is no way you can manage a team with email. It’s nearly impossible to even manage a one-to-one project with two people. It doesn’t work. There are tons of reasons based on tons of research.
- Repeat rule #1 until it gets annoying. Seriously, just stop. This is 2014 and there are lots of better ways.
- Decide on one collaboration system and stick to it. I don’t care what this is. Use Basecamp, use Google Docs, use Podio, or use Asana (my personal favorite). Whatever you do, share the project with everyone and require your team to use it. No email about the project, ever. It all goes in the tool. Stay in the loop by staying in the tool. Fall out of the loop at your own peril. If you are merciless about this the team will fall in line and they will love you for it. Working on shitty projects sucks. No one wants that. Good management feels good to everyone involved. Tie it to getting paid if you have to. My teams know I bring them great projects and I pay them well and this is how I do it. No questions asked. We don’t even talk about it anymore. We literally just kick off projects without a discussion because I start an Asana project and then we start billing.
- Did I mention email ruins project effectiveness? Go ahead and try. If you don’t believe me by this point you shouldn’t be reading this article. It’s going to take you a lot longer to do your work and you shouldn’t be screwing around on LinkedIn.
- Run the project like you care. Communicate with each person with care and trust until trust has been damaged. If trust has been damaged try to repair it. If you can’t repair it, end the relationship. No harm, no foul. This is project-based interviewing. If you do what needs to be done you’ll get more work. If you don’t, you won’t. It’s pretty easy. Over time you’ll end up with a killer team that will do whatever you need done because they care about you and they trust you.
- Document processes the first time and then outsource them. You don’t need your top people doing menial crap for high payment while getting increasingly bored. Every process should be boiled down to its basic components, turned into a workflow, and outsourced on Elance or Odesk. Build business machines and run them. Pay your contractors well for the little pieces they do. Care about them, too. They will love you and come back for more projects. It’s just like #5 yet not on your core team.
- Email still sucks.
Resumes are dead. Interviews are largely ineffectual. Linked-In is good. Portfolios are useful.
But projects are the real future of hiring, especially knowledge working hiring. No matter how wonderful your references or how well you do on those too-clever-by-half Microsoft/Google brainteasers, serious firms will increasingly ask serious candidates to do serious work in order to get a serious job offer.
I dog on the HBR sometimes, too, but this article is spot on. It works. Do it. If you manage your project like I’m suggesting and you use your projects to build an awesome team through experience, you will see remarkably better results and you will bill more money or see more success from your startups. #winning