Manage the What, Not the How
Hi! I’m Molly. I write about what it actually takes to lead inside growing, changing companies: the frameworks that help, the honest truth about what it feels like, and the messy work of shaping a career that actually fits.
Lessons is where those ideas live — both the writing and the conversations around it. (If you want to learn more about how Lessons and the community work, you can read more here.)
When I first became a manager, I had a tendency to micromanage my employees’ process — “how” they did things instead of “what” they produced.
This is a really common pattern I see in a lot of leaders who have never managed people before (I’m looking at you, founders), especially those who are detail-oriented, high performing, and opinionated about what quality looks like (which typically is what made them successful in the first place).
Controlling how work gets done only makes your company slower. Employees will inevitably do things that make you cringe, take different approaches than you, and sometimes even truly mess up. But it’s rare that the best answer is to try to control their process.
What you learn with experience is that in addition to all those negative moments you will sometimes see people do things better and faster and more creatively than you ever could if you learn to let go and focus on the “what”. If you spend your time controlling the “how”, you miss all the best parts of building a team and all the true power that comes from enabling people to find the solution that they think is best.
It’s tempting to manage how employees work. But in 90% of cases, what really matters is: Did you hit the goal?
To run a successful company, particularly one past a certain size, controlling the “how” is simply not an option. You have to learn to be extraordinary at aliging around the “what” and at coaching people as they go.
To let go of the “how,” get really good at defining the “what”
The highest performing team I've ever worked with was the Quip team. Our engineering team was incredibly fast at shipping improvements and features in the product. They were more productive than most teams 10x their size. It was unlike anything I had seen before or since. Neither of the cofounders managed the hours that people were working or where they worked; they didn’t manage how the work got done. Their management was all about alignment (do people understand what’s important, what we’re building, and why) and clear expectations (“we need to ship this feature by this date”).
The key to exceptional management is to get great at defining the “what”. As a leader, you need to know how to create alignment, how to clarify what you expect, and how to communicate all of it.
