Leadership Guided by Intentionality

Can you describe one leadership practice you have established to hold people accountable on your team, given that the entire team doesn’t get an opportunity to have face to face conversations and connections every day?

We always ask people to write down what they’re doing. For a number of different reasons, I cannot believe being one, but sometimes we just don’t understand what people are doing. And sometimes they don’t understand what they’re doing.

Now the truth comes out.

I don’t know if that’s true in your environment, but we would be like, “We see it”, and certain people will be like, “Oh, we got to get going” and they start to type. You’re starting to type and starting to, “What are you doing?” “Oh, I’ve got to fix this.” “Okay, tell me what you’re going to fix? How you’re going to fix it, when you’re going to fix it by. Is that the right fix? Tell me what you’re trying to do before you go do it.” I know when we’re modeling homes, we want to see the plan before we start cracking open the walls, right? And we take the attitude here, too.

We’re a startup and we’ve really got to move fast. But the first thing to do with moving fast is, do what’s necessary. There’s no time for extraneous work. You can’t be haphazard about things. And that’s a discipline that we’ve instilled from the beginning that you really write down what you’re trying to do, what is the goal of what you’re trying to do, and let’s all take a look. Because then you’re going to embark on a two/three-week endeavor to kind of go do that, at least we all know, that’s really what we wanted to do. But sometimes, I’ve been in places where, especially engineers will get so excited and they start working and then they’re like, two/three weeks into, “What are you trying to do? Who asked for it?” And so, at startups, you just can’t afford… we’re so short staffed, you can’t afford to do that. And so, what is that? Measure twice cut once? So, let’s make sure that this is what we want to do.