In my initial years working with a Silicon Valley-based technology company I was employed remotely, with the goal of expanding our product into foreign markets. The scope of the role was exciting, but presented many challenges, especially maintaining strong communications channels with the business core, and translating our business plans across markets. One key planning framework I found enormously useful to address these challenges was the following:
Initiative, Transparency, and Validation
Independent of your level of seniority, the goal is to…
- Use your own planning to define a business path
- Create an accountable and informative operating environment to share that path
- Tighten the feedback loop with your peers (manager, colleague, or team) to ensure all parties are on the same page about the path forward
I see a lot of literature for managers around the right balance of delegation, or employees “managing up”, but this model is explicitly around self-management, regardless of whether you are an early employee, or senior manager.
It’s a model that allows for distributed decision making that will allow a business to be more agile and empowered across the whole company. Ultimately, this will increase the rate of the company’s growth, a must for any start-up or smaller business.
The “task” at hand, for which is tempting to seek the answer from others, can range from the seemingly mundane…
Can I take leave next week?
…to highly sophisticated…
Where should I start on designing the business plan to rollout our new ‘flex-screen’ product?
For every task, a plan should be structured with a proposal in mind (initiative), an explanation/justification of that proposal (transparency), and a mechanism for high-quality feedback (validation), ideally leading to a response as simple as “that sounds great”.
I’d like to take leave next week… I’ve spoken to the accounts team who can direct my customers to Andrew and Jennifer (who are most suitable because of <explanation>), while I can push the steering meeting until early next month which will allow more time for the field testing to progress, and Amy can cover my interviews. I’ll bring the planning meeting forward to Friday. Anything I’ve missed?
I’m commencing the business plan for flex-screen… We’re going to start with a segment analysis as we don’t currently have a strong sense of the key customers which intersect high-portability and high-specification requirements, then we can overlay the marketing levers that appeal to this group, which we’ll do by X, Y, Z… Are there other areas I should incorporate to start?
In each example you’re taking the initiative to propose a path forward, but you’re also including the “why”… An explanation that makes your proposal accountable. Remember your Year 10 maths homework? It wasn’t just the final answer, it was your steps to achieve that answer that demonstrated your understanding of the problem. This explanation allows your audience to validate the suitability of your proposal, but also identify gaps and propose alternatives/expansions.
Have confidence that you are most likely deepest in the core of the decision to be made. It’s unlikely anyone has better context than you. You best understand your workload before taking leave, and you have the most intimate understanding of the product to develop a business plan. Let’s leverage that context to drive towards the right outcome.
Wait, you might be a new employee; what if you don’t have all the context?
That’s fine. Let’s use transparency and validation to iterate quickly on the ‘knowns’, the ‘unknowns’, and finally… the right outcome.
- What is the problem at hand?
- What information is required to address that problem?
- Is all of that information available to us? If not, what are the gaps and what/who do I need to gather that information?
- For the information I need from others, what do they need to know from me to provide the right information most effectively?
- Are there assumptions I can make, which can be validated by others, that can lead me to recommending an outcome?
- How can I synthesise this information most effectively to justify the decision behind the outcome, including highlighting the assumptions and gaps?
What you’ve done here is created a self-directing process which highlights gaps and assumptions in your own thinking. It’s a model for self-validation, and it’s tremendously powerful in grasping the problem at hand and providing direction on where you stand in your ability to solve it.
When you do reach out to your peers with your proposal, it’s directing energy to where it’s most required. You’ve already summarised the problem for your peer. You’ve been able to show your thinking for your peer to validate your plan, and you’ve led them to final gaps which most require their input. If iteration is required, you’ve created is a tight feedback loop which will continue to rapidly narrow to a conclusion. It’s okay to ask questions, but you’ve used this process to narrow your question scope.
I appreciate this is harder for newer employees who don’t have all the tools, context and experience to work entirely autonomously. What is the right balance of self-learning vs asking? Is there a chance of going down the wrong path or missing the point? Maybe, but even if you know a subset of the information required to solve the problem, you should follow the steps above.
At a higher level, you’re going to put to put yourself out there and expose what you know and what you don’t. Transparency should be a core value for every business… The faster you expose the plan, the gaps, and the proposed solution, the faster we get to the right outcome.
A key failure mode of this process is a lack of guidance about where to focus. Perhaps you’ll be wondering if you’re addressing the right problem in the first place. If this is the case, it’s probably best to repeat the problem back to your peer in the first instance to confirm you’re on the right track, then return to solving that problem.
Finally, this is not meant to be overly verbose, or impose long-running iteration cyclings unnecessarily. The goal is not to write a novel with each decision point, but to find the right balance of iteration that will lead to confident decision making, self-development, and autonomy.
Your role, career path and contributions are yours to control – grasp it! In turn, your business will thank you.