Clarity of ownership and objective.
A simple approach to managing a high performing team.
Over the last year or so, I’ve had conversations with a handful of early stage companies when, in discussing some intractable growth problem I’d ask the question, “well, who owns revenue?” And in almost every case the answer was some version of “uh, I guess I do,” “we all do,” “the x team does” and “no one does.”
This isn’t typically a trick question. The answer is supposed to be a very quick “Tina does.” After all, how do you stand a chance of solving a problem if it’s not even clear who’s accountable for solving it?
You can’t push a string
Getting a large group of people to do a hard thing is not a very easy task. Trillions of words have been written and zillions of airport bookstores filled with 1,001 ways to lead organizations and manage people. Unfortunately, most of these strategies are at best overly complicated and at worst completely ineffective. Indeed most companies sink an incredible amount of time and money into things like organizational design, decision making models, people management frameworks, and executive hiring thinking that their exact right combination will achieve operating nirvana and unlock meteoric growth.
DoorDash, a company I was incredibly fortunate to have a small hand in building, did it differently.
A delivery marketplace is one of the hardest and most complicated businesses out there. To start, you have three different customers: consumers, drivers and restaurants. You then have all the permutations of different countries, different products (restaurants, grocery, convenience, etc.), and different central functions (product, engineering, logistics, marketing, etc.). It would have been basically impossible to manage that company with just an org chart.
Instead, at the center of DoorDash’s operations was the simple idea of ownership. That every person had perfect clarity over the problem they and only they owned (clarity of ownership) and the timeline on which they were expected to solve it (clarity of objective). In this way the org chart, the reporting lines, the business units, none of that mattered. All that mattered was that if you were the one person whose job it was to grow the Australian grocery delivery business by 54% in Q1 then you were expected to go anywhere, work with anyone, do anything necessary to hit your goal.
This approach has two huge benefits. The first is that as a teammate you have to waste no time figuring out what your job is. You know with crystal clarity the problem you are responsible for and the quantitative metric by which your success will be measured. So when you get to work each morning, you know exactly the fires you need to put out, the people you need to hire, the customers you need to sell, the products you need to ship. The second is that as a manager, your direct reports ideally need very little micromanagement. They can make prioritization decisions, ask for resources, take cross-functional meetings and escalate problems simply based on whether those activities help them get to their goal. This drives substantial operating leverage giving managers the time they need to uplevel themselves to tackle bigger problems and drive greater impact for the business.
So, how do you put these simple ideas into practice? To start, let’s imagine that you’re asked to take on greater scope and to do this you’re given budget to hire a new direct report, Doug. He starts in a week.
What would ya say you do here
The first thing that Doug is going to want to know is simply “what is my job”? And while that seems like an easy question to answer, the way we frame our direct reports’ jobs has huge implications for our success as managers.
First, you could define Doug’s job as a “task doer,” wherein Doug rocks up on Monday morning and you tell Doug exactly the tasks he has to complete that week, the end.
Second, you could define Doug’s job as a “project completer,” wherein Doug needs to finish a specific project on a specific timeline. And thus success for Doug is simply getting his project done, on-spec, on-time.
Or third, you could define Doug’s job as a functional “skill haver,” where just like Ken’s job is beach, Doug’s job is operator. He does operations on the operations team.
As you’ve probably guessed, these approaches all have the same flaw.
Imagine it’s Monday morning at 6am and you’re just learning the purple widget production line has been offline all weekend and you’re now way off your quarterly schedule. If Doug is just a task doer and checking in on purple widget production was never his task, then this issue is still your problem. If Doug is just a project completer and purple widget production has nothing to do with his project then this issue is still your problem. If Doug is just one coequal member of the widget team sitting at his desk wondering if he was supposed to be monitoring purple widget production then this issue is still your problem.
And if this issue is still your problem it means you’re still having to do your old job while trying - and likely failing - to simultaneously do your new job.
The solution is of course a fourth way, where Doug is an “owner” whose job is defined by the specific problem that he (and only he) owns and is accountable for. In this case, you assign Doug to own purple widget production and set the expectation that come hell or high water he owns ensuring there is consistent, reliable purple widget production. Thus, when Doug wakes up every morning, 365 days a year, the very first thing he does is check the prior day’s purple widget production count. And if there is any deviation from plan, he knows that it’s on him and him alone to figure out what’s happened and fix immediately, with the intensity of 1,000 white hot suns. This is clarity of ownership.
Alright, so you’ve got Doug trained with hawk-like focus on your purple widget production. What now.
Outputs, not inputs
Many companies assume if they just direct their people toward the right problems they’ll go out and solve them as quickly as possible. In reality, left with an open ended goal of just “make better” and an unbound timeline of “soon” most people will lose efficiency from working on many of the wrong things and lose time from not moving fast enough. Or, worse yet, they’ll focus more on doing the inputs (“I’m working so hard, I’m doing x, y, z”) than on achieving the desired outputs (“I am/ am not hitting my goal”).
The solution is clarity of objective, the idea that each person has a specific measurable goal they need to achieve and a timeline on which they’ll achieve it. The rest - how they specifically achieve their objective - is largely up to their own hustle, horsepower and creativity. (An added benefit here being that this is how top talent prefers to be managed).
So, if you’re managing our friend Doug, you’re going to need to give him some marching orders on what he needs to do with purple widget production. Does he need to increase production volume by 10% this quarter? Decrease the defect rate by 8%? Reduce cost per unit by 19%? Whatever it is, Doug needs to know that he’s expected to make measurable improvements in his problem set, and is accountable for hitting his objective on time.
The benefits of giving clarity
While not the most complicated ideas the power of giving clarity of ownership and objective is substantial. You, as a manager, can spend limited, focused time up front in setting your direct reports in the right direction and then allow them to go out and achieve the results you need them to achieve. More specifically you can expect improved:
Focus: Any [especially new] direct report trying to figure out where to begin their work can simply look to what inputs will make the biggest impact to reaching their objective
Hustle: Nothing lights a fire under a direct report more than knowing that everyone’s looking at them and only them to deliver a particular result
Culture: Knowing that every teammate is being held visibly accountable to their specific objective helps create a high-performing, high-trust culture
Creativity: There’s no point in hiring extraordinary talent and then telling them what to do. Give your direct reports an objective (and the constraints) and then let them bring forward and execute their best ideas to get there.
Prioritization: A clear objective and timeline help to prioritize the things that will help a direct report hit their goal, and de-prioritize the things that won’t
Operating leverage: As a manager, much if not all of the above starts getting done without your direct involvement such that you can focus on whatever’s of most value