Managing People at Crater

When Googling your way around the web, you’ll stumble upon lots of different views on leadership, types of leaders, and ways of guiding your people to a desired outcome. But when you really think about it, there is only one way of true leadership here.

Once you’ve established the foundation of your business, you should only be thinking about hiring the right people, showing them the finish line, and letting them do their jobs. We need to be honest with each other and agree that if you want your people to be both productive and happy — the best ideas have to win. Every single day. That’s how I look at leadership.

An Engaged Start-up

At Crater, most of our people are still very young. They’re enthusiastic, smart, and hungry for success. They possess different skill sets that create value and that’s why we chose them in the first place. Having talented individuals offers any company in the world a fast road to getting things done. For a startup to achieve it’s goal, recruiting and hiring these individuals is of crucial importance. Steve Jobs once said: “Great people don’t need to be managed. They’re self-managed. What they need is a common vision”. That’s what leadership is. Point blank!

Once you have the team vibrating with different talents, you get two new and extremely important priorities. One is articulating the company’s vision and the other is leading by example. As a leader, your responsibility is to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are in their respective jobs, letting them perform them in their own way, and later guide them to become leaders of the future.

That’s what teamwork is all about. Trusting that everybody will come through with their task. All you need to do here is hold people accountable and touch base every now and then. If you’ve set the common vision so everybody understands it, trust your people to get everything done.

There are many, many self-proclaimed leaders who run from arguments and prefer to establish tight control from the start. Their way is to take responsibility themselves and lead on all fronts. I have no doubt that this is a brave thing to do. But it’s not effective and it will not take you anywhere. If you’re a person who will win all arguments and wants to be the one that makes all decisions regardless of whether we’re talking about marketing, operations, development or finance — you shall take a dead-end road.

People who are run by hierarchy will slow the entire operation down. Your team members will have troubles reaching their full potential in a situation like this. Instead, make sure best ideas win all the time. Whether they come from you or someone else, doesn’t really matter if the goal gets accomplished. If best ideas don’t win and with no trust between team members, great people are going to leave.

It takes five players on the basketball court to win a championship. Lebron, Kobe, and Curry won tons of games, but they would have never won a championship without trusting their teammates to do their parts. The same applies to any product.

Let your engineer construct the product and the marketing person to do your branding. As a leader, one of your main tasks is to articulate the common vision and sit with everybody to talk about the progress. Everybody must be willing to admit their own mistakes, learn from them, and move forward. Having productive disagreements and handling them the right way is key.

Bottom Line

Maybe the best way to finish this text is by reflecting on a day at Crater and how my collaboration with these young people looks like. I can’t even begin to count the times I’ve stayed up late to finish something urgent or because time just flew by and can’t go to sleep before finishing it. And that’s the beautiful thing when you’re passionate about your job. You don’t care about sleep that much.

As a leader, when you empower your people and give them the right tools to fulfill their roles, they are going to respond and embrace your passion. Some of my young colleagues are staying up with me, they have my back and they made that decision by themselves, not because I told them so. Things like this motivate me even more.

Sure, I make mistakes from time to time. But, with these people and this project — we’re learning, we’re moving and we’re not going to stop any time soon. Please empower and nurture your people. We always need great leaders and great products.