Welcome to the show, everybody! Today we talk about how to supercharge your management skills with the co-founder of Fellow.app, Aydin Mirzaee. Aydin is a tech-loving entrepreneur with a passion for building great products, leadership, and people.
We also discuss:
- How Fellow.app started out,
- Learning how to trust and delegate tasks,
- What makes a great manager,
- What Fellow.app can do for managers,
- How managers can help a team produce 10x more without their involvement, and more.
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A great leader trusts and delegates
My perception of what a home run is in leadership changed over the course of time. When I was a lot younger, it was very results-focused. If the results are produced, who cares how the results were achieved? And if it meant that I was doing a lot of heavy lifting and didn’t trust other people to do their parts – no matter how it got done, if the result was achieved, that’s all that matters. That was my view, which was obviously very wrong and short-sighted.
My view on what a home run is today is much more people-centric.
Over the course of time, I clued in that I’m actually not really great at everything, and that other people can be a lot better than I am at most things. So it obviously makes sense to make sure that your team can pick up tasks and responsibilities. It will take them some time, but your job as a manager is to be there to give them feedback, so that they can improve very quickly, and eventually they will be better than you.
Now, for me, a home run is when I’m not even involved in any team or project.
What makes Follow.app such a great tool
One of the things that a lot of people tend to ask us is, “Hey, you have this thing called Fellow and you’re basically building it for managers. What management philosophy do you subscribe to? What makes a good manager? Are you following some McKinsey methodology, or is this based on some HBR study?”
That’s an important thing when people ask that question because they’re like, “Well, if we’re going to get people within our org to start using this thing, we probably should agree with what methodology you’re proposing.”
The thing is, Fellow is none of that. Fellow approaches all this stuff from a completely different approach. Our view on this was we wanted to build this tool that was super lightweight and all it did was it gave people the ability to do all the workflows that we think are best practices that most people should do. It just makes it super easy for everybody to do it, and do it most of the time.
What makes a great manager
At a very basic level, we believe that managers should have one-on-ones and that they should be done regulary. We believe that they should get feedback, and often, on work that’s being done, and in a timely manner.
We believe that they should recognize employees and that should be done throughout the year so you can basically track these things over the course of time.
We think that they should run effective meetings. We think that they should help prioritize the work that their team is working on and help set goals and help set a vision and communicate. We think that they should be responsible; not only hold themselves accountable, but also hold their team accountable for things that are agreed upon in group settings.
The things we’re talking about are not some methodology or anything like that. These are all things that we think all managers should do.
Mentions
Connect with Aydin: LinkedIn | Twitter
The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You by Julie Zhuo
The Art of the 1on1 Meeting eBook
Our lessons from the “Making of a Manager”
