haruki zaemon

The instinct to manage people causes us to solve their problems and make decisions for them. Blakeman urges us to instead:

train others to solve and decide, and then get out of the way. Leaders who figure out they shouldn’t make decisions can lead wildly successful companies devoid of command-and-control management.

When we make decisions for others long enough, we eventually erode their sense of purpose, agency, and motivation:

Ownership is the most powerful motivator in business, and the ability to make decisions is at the core of ownership. Stop solving and deciding for others. They are adults. They can do it themselves, and better than you could. Instead, ask questions, train others to make great decisions, and then get out of the way and let them do it.

We all need to make decisions; we don’t need to make all the decisions:

The art of leadership is to know how few decisions the leader needs to make.

Give people their brains back. Stop managing (making decisions). Start leading.

1. #decision-making
2. #leadership
3. #management
4. #scaling

It was lovely to meet and chat with such a great bunch of open, curious, and pragmatic leaders:

• Kunal Madhav, GoodHuman’s CTO.
• Nadeesha Cabral, Mr Yum’s Director of Engineering.
• Sumesh Suvarna, Aesop’s Head of Engineering.

We discussed challenges, approaches, mistakes, and lessons we’ve learnt scaling teams.

Mostly though, I just enjoyed the conversation. It didn’t necessarily always stay on topic, in a good way.

1. #decision-making
2. #leadership
3. #management
4. #organisational-dynamics
5. #podcast
6. #psychological-safety
7. #scaling
8. #software-engineering