Lately I spent some time setting up a house for an Air B&B. The last time I did this, I had my mother and stepfather with me. I bought all the furniture and they pretty much did everything else—putting together the furniture, installing locks, putting up paintings, getting all the beddings and towels sorted out. For me it was “easy”---everything was just done.
This time, because of Covid, I don’t have my parents to help me. So I turn to my younger daughter.
Both my mother and daughters are much smarter than me. I don’t say this in the sense that they can get graduate degrees or pass bar exams with more ease. They may, I don’t know. I say this in the sense that they are all much handier than me. I am 200% useless when it comes to assembling anything. I can’t read instructions. Even when I could read instructions, I have a hard time following them. I get impatient. I skip steps. I miss certain details. I am overall not a detail oriented person (what’s why I was never a successful and happy lawyer). And doing things with my hand is not my forte, except for painting impressionist style painting.
So this time, I brought my younger daughter with me to set up the Air B&B with me. In 5 days, we assembled six beds, one sofa, six night stands, got 80% of everything the house needs, pots and pans, paintings, bedding and towels, etc.
I say “we” but it was mostly her. But because we are pressured on time and there is a lot to do, I had to pitch in and help. So for the first time in my life, I actually put together Ikea and Wayfair furniture.
There are a few reasons I did it. One is of course to help to speed up the project. Two, and more importantly, in certain cases, even though I may or may not be actually helping that substantially, the fact that I was doing it with her gave her a lot of motivation, in that at least we were in this together. Third, now that I have done it my self, I develop a new appreciation for how things actually work, how much effort and thought it takes to read the instructions, figure out the different pieces, what could go wrong in that process, and even how difficult it might be to screw a screw in. When you only see the final work product, you just don’t understand the amount of thought and effort that goes into a seemingly simple Ikea side table. Of course, it was also good bonding and we actually had some fun collaborating and working on the pieces together.
This makes me reflect on how leaders and CEOs lead the team and work at a company or startup.
1. Doing it is the best way to learn it and then knowing what’s good and what’s not
Similar to me building Ikea furniture, my co-founder and I are doing some SEO projects ourselves. Not that we can’t hire experts to do it. We do have an agency that has given us very detailed guidance about what to do.
We are doing it not only because we are trying to save money, we are. We are mostly doing it because we want to learn it and master it. It doesn’t mean that we will continue to do SEO ourselves and will never delegate. But we want to acquire the knowledge and expertise so that we can master this area. In the future, we can totally see us hiring agencies or even full time employees to manage SEO. But now that we have done it, we will understand what it means to do good work, what to look for, how to check whether an agency has done a good job, among other things.
As our startup continues to grow, I foresee us doing more and more things ourselves before we delegate and hire. At my previous employment, I used to manage an AP team, but never really understood it what meant. Don’t bills just get paid? Now that I am doing AP myself, I get the different requests and how we respond would differ. Some people only accept ACH. Others want to be paid via Venmo! In the future, when I do hire for AP, I would understand an AP’s challenges and what good work means.
2. Walking the walk truly motivates the team
On a separate note, when leaders and CEOs roll up their sleeves and actually get dirt on their hands, it’s extremely motivating to the team.
Back in the corporate world, we always debate whether we should have mid managers whose only job is to “manage”. I’ve always hated it.
If a procurement leader can’t take a deal, run models on it, negotiate it and close on it, what kind of procurement leader is she or he? It doesn’t matter whether I was managing five person teams or 15 person teams, I was always doing deals myself. I liked the intellectual challenge. I liked staying close to the ground and interacting with engineers to understand how things fit together. More importantly, when the team sees me doing it, they know that I get it, I live the pain and they must do a good job to impress me.
This is the same as in the military, as I mentioned in my piece about servant leadership. The general might be hiding out in the base. But the best generals are the ones that run in front of the troop and fire the bullets. In Chinese we say, 身先士卒， putting your body in front of the soldiers.
So when my team sees me hand paint posters for an expo or recording videos showing my own face for a social media piece, they know this is important to us as a team and I mean it. They then have the motivation to do other things to help us achieve our goals. Just as when my daughter saw me screwing in screws, she felt that she was not alone.
3. Doing it gives the leaders a true appreciation of the nuisances and the difficulties
We always say, knowing the road is different from walking the road. Only when we do something ourselves and dive in deep, we see what can go wrong how and fully grasp the nuisances and difficulties to get anything done.
I’ve made plenty of mistakes even when I was building something seemingly simple. Then when I saw my daughter putting together a much complicated piece, I had a brand new appreciation of her skills and ability.
I am not saying that every CEO should learn to code or know how to build hardware. All that I am saying is if we try to do it ourselves once, we have a much better appreciation of the team’s work and their challenges.
So if you are a technical CEO, maybe learn to build a financial model or negotiate a piece of contract. See how many things you have to consider and what can go wrong. While it’s easy to watch others saving hundreds of thousands or millions, it may not be that easy when you are trying to do it yourself. Similarly, if you are a non technical CEO, maybe try to write a few lines of code or help build a website. After I tried to modify our website and royally messed it up, I finally understand the amount of effort my co-founder put in to make our site look beautiful.
So this is my tip of the day, for tasks in a company or a startup, just like any food, at least try it once, yah ?
?
Comments