Kathleen Li

Someone in the company approached me today and asked “Hi, I saw that you have 7 direct reports, how do you do it all, especially when we are now all remote?”

My first reaction is that I need to admit this is not easy, and it might not be most efficient to have so many direct reports as we are growing into a 10-person team while having a couple of analysts in the team that needs more day-to-day coaching and guidance. This becomes more challenging when the company moved to “Remote First” business mode during the pandemic.

Here I summarized a few tips and a reflection of my personal experience navigating the challenges in the past year.

Keep people motivated!

I believe motivation is the most important thing for an employee to succeed at their current role. However, people might be motivated by different things, some are excited about gaining new skill sets, some are enthusiastic about the project or job itself, some are mission-driven and some could just be motivated by the compensation. As a manager, I always try to learn about what my team member is interested in, what do they care about, and try to meet their needs as much as I can.

Hold them accountable towards something!

It’s important to make people feel that what they own is impactful. Releasing responsibility and making sure that they have this sense of ownership can keep them on the right track. I always tell my team “think about yourself as the CEO, what decision will you make here?”, so that they started to think more about the broader picture, proactively look for more information to come to a comprehensive solution or decision. “Make the investments for the company as it’s your money here!”. This eventually leads to a more autonomous team with less escalations, and more capable employee who’s being more and more comfortable taking on responsibility in the next level.

Regular team meeting for more dynamic communication!

We used to only have a team meeting on a weekly basis before the pandemic, but I started a daily standup series at the beginning of the work-from-home mode. It turned out to be pretty effective. I was able to receive daily updates on the projects that my team is working on. It also helped me build up the culture of strong collaboration within team as when one of my team members shares challenges and problems, all the others would jump on and try to contribute ideas. It also generates a strong bond for the team as we were not always just talk about work, and chi-chatting and gossiping created an open and relaxing environment for people to enjoy work. I think it’s important for you to be happy at what you are doing while enjoying working with the people surrounding you. Once I noticed that the culture of collaboration has been set up and there are more and more side talks happening among team members, I kept the standup as placeholder meetings – sometimes just cancel as ad-hoc to give back time for my team.

You might wonder what we will discuss in the stand up. Here is a tentative agenda that rotates on a weekly basis:

Monday: What’s the top 3 things you will work on for this week? Better to share more context so the rest of team know the background information.

Tuesday: Sharing of good practice / learnings – one person will share a specific topic and leads to discussion

Wednesday: Q&A with me – leave time if there is any escalation that needed to be discussed (placeholder meeting)

Thursday: Formal team meeting that covers Passdown from leadership, XFN updates, and team updates

Friday: A recap of top 3 things that everyone worked on to close out the week

These team meetings are good channels for me keep up-to-date on key initiatives and help remove their blockers. However, I will always make sure there are a time set aside for pass downs, which is the Thursday meeting in the above schedule. In these sessions, I will share what did I learn from our VP, what I heard in some broader XFN discussions, and making sure the information could flow from top to bottom, as goals and guidances sometimes shifted quickly and it will impact our day to day decisions. I will sometimes share my observations of how the team is doing (using exact examples) and what’s been keeping me busy. This is usually the most interesting part of the meeting for my team, and they have told me several times how much they like to hear these updates from the top.

Establish a team structure, grow people and set up for longer term success!

It’s no longer going to be effective once you have more than 6 direct reports while not all of them are fully autonomous – this is a common pain of middle managers. It’s also not fair for the junior folks as they might not get all the support and guidance they need in their early careers. I would like to pair a senior member with a junior member so that the juniors always have someone to turn to for guidance, while the senior team member could be accountable for outcome, while are giving the opportunity to develop leadership and further expand their scopes.

I feel very lucky to have most of my team members to be self-driven, hard working as well as capable, though we are scattered around West Coast, East Coast as well as Middle West.

There is a lot for me to learn about management and leadership as well. I hope what I shared so far is useful for whoever that read till here, and please feel free to share your thoughts at the comment section below!