Our ecosystem is trying to increase the amount of work it does very quickly.
This means that leadership should approach capacity-building as if they were at a startup, rather than a steady-state organisation.
Here’s a stark way to put this is:
Aim to be at a point where you’re not required to do much work to maintain the functions you oversee. And then build more. All functions you’ve built should be ‘owned’ by someone who isn’t you. Those owners should independently be doing a strong job of overseeing their work.
Your oversight should look like: inputting into the highest-stakes decisions within those functions, generally figureheading, coaching and developing staff, determining team direction, overseeing coordination across the team, and so on. You’ll often dive into the object-level details of a team you oversee to gather information for assessment or coaching, or to execute on one of the few projects which the owner can’t get to yet.1
For a team in our ecosystem, which is likely a) growing and b) facing a complicated strategic environment, I’d expect that if someone managed to get their team into the situation above then it would look like them:
Spending ~20 hours per week on team leadership.
Being able to drop out of work for 3 months without anything breaking.2
Now, of course, at the point that someone reaches the position above, they typically won’t just drop out of the office for 3 months. Instead, they’ll put their time elsewhere, for example:
Spinning up a new function. For example, I spent around half of my proactive time in the second half of last year spinning up a strategic analysis function (which didn’t really previously exist), and our Head of Growth aimed a quarter at looking into new verticals to spin up.
Taking on one of their boss’s responsibilities. Obviously which responsibilities you can take on depends on your respective fits and career aims. But in most manager–direct relationships there is usually some responsibility which the direct could plausibly grow to take on.
Firefighting. Dealing with someone on the team quitting unexpectedly or getting sick, or some other crisis.
Recovery. Going through a period of ‘jogging’ rather than sprinting, to recover and enable them to sprint hard in the future. This might include some combination of working less and developing personally.
Leaving. If none of the above seems valuable enough to do, then working to hand the team over to someone else and leaving.
I’m worried that people might misread this and decide that they should just hire someone, declare that they own a responsibility, assume that it will go well, and leave them to it. That isn’t sufficient. Instead, you need to do the oversight work described above. This is a lot of work!
In fact, you might never get to the point where you’d be able to drop out of the office for 3 months. But being marginally closer to that point and being able to drop marginally more time into options 1-5 above is valuable, so you should build towards it anyway.
I think that my considered view is that most leaders in our ecosystem should be aiming for a setup like this3, and that ~all operations leaders should be.
If you lead an operations team at one of the organisations we write for and you don’t currently share that view, there’s a good chance that speaking to me about it will change the orientation you take to your work, and increase the value of your work. If you’d like to have that conversation, fill in this short form and I’ll be in touch.
Though ideally you’re increasingly delegating this to a Chief of Staff-type.
Someone on your team would be very capable of stepping into your role on an interim basis. It wouldn’t be perfect: things would be worse and the team’s progress would be slower. For example, in that time the interim lead probably won’t get their head into all of the team direction and development work you were doing, or seriously level up the team on anything. But nothing would ‘break’. The team would be able to keep things going without missing a beat.
There will definitely be some cases where I don’t think that this holds.
Whilst I have nothing substantive to add, I would like to say that posts like these are extremely helpful as someone trying to run an organisation. Increasingly, I think as we get more founders and AI safety orgs, tacit knowledge like this is very helpful to read.