Being a leader of a team is exciting and sometimes a challenge. Every day, I fight for my company’s position on the market, supervise all internal processes and lead strategic planning. Leadership is a process whose development never stops. In the 15 years of my career and experience at C-level positions, I have developed three basic principles on how to be an inspiring and successful leader and I adhere to them in my daily work with the team.
Structure the Day and Make Your Schedule Transparent for Your Team
Your management and leadership skills are determined by your ability to decompose the tasks, define their priority and focus on a certain problem. My previous experience has shown that when we attempt to tackle everything at once, without prioritizing, delegating and self-analysis, the results will be minimal. My day is split into two parts. Between 9 am and 2 pm, I have meetings and calls with my team, partners and investors. I try to use these hours as effectively as possible. The second part of the day is usually spent on less important projects, dealing with mail and managerial tasks.
But being a leader means helping your team to structure their days and to simplify business processes. Our team has an essential instrument in the form of wiki.postoplan.com. It enables us to create a more productive onboarding experience for the new employees. This Wiki includes more than the rules of communication and names of people responsible for various fields of operation. Thanks to these guides, we were able to go from 10 to 27 people in our team in a matter of just four months. In the next month, we plan to add another six people to our team. Such guides are very useful for remote teams that have more than five people because they help to cut the learning time for new personnel and improve the team’s overall productivity. For us, it helped to establish the business processes and cut the employee turnover. 95% of employees stay with us from the start and recommend Postoplan as a great startup for career development.
Feedback as a Point of Personal Growth
Giving and receiving feedback is not always an easy thing to do. But this is an essential area of personal growth as a leader. I believe that any feedback is valuable and that it is incredibly important to discuss everything in a positive light, even shortcomings. It helps to improve a company’s internal processes and to make your team stronger experts. But learning to give feedback is as important as learning to receive it.
Of course, most of the leaders will say that they want to hear honest feedback even if the words are hard. In reality, this is far from so. For feedback to be valuable, it has to come from real professionals and experts. I’m convinced that any feedback I receive as a founder & CEO of my startup is valuable for my professional path. I tend to use investors’ feedback as advice on how to boost my business and my team’s feedback as a tool for building a strong market player.
In our company, anyone can speak out on any subject. Me and my managers’ team will always listen. And then this opinion will be discussed by people working in the department that received this feedback. This feedback is offered up for discussion, and every participant may share their own point of view. If the majority concur, we make a decision and take action. If things don’t fit together, we try to figure out what went wrong and how we can fix it.
Avoid Burnout
I’m convinced that the monotony of operational work is the principal reason for professional burnout. The marketing processes frequently require you to be creative in the beginning, but then, most of the work, such as setting up and tweaking the ads, placement of ads, etc., is very monotonous and can easily lead to burnout. To provide this assistance, we compile clear-cut guides both for the routine processes and for interaction between employees. We divide the work chats into priority and less urgent tasks, we reduce the sources of task allocation, regulate the workdays, control the employees’ workload to avoid overtime, and give all the employees constant access to their superiors.
We have two managers who are responsible for inter-department communication and for the establishment of business processes overall. One is focused on general corporate problems such as inter-department relations, employees’ needs, and corporate communications. The second is focused on the IT department and its internal objectives. These two business units help us to establish and fine-tune all the business processes in a way that removes the monotonous load off the employees’ shoulders and helps them avoid burnout.