How do you manage burn-out in your teams? Product and Ecommerce Leader, Brian Flanagan, shares his thoughts in this short video clip. This interview...
How do you manage burn-out in your teams? Product and Ecommerce Leader, Brian Flanagan, shares his thoughts in this short video clip. This interview took place at our recent Product x Design event.
At its most basic, as leaders, we have to do our job, which is to help our teams understand what the most important stuff is that they should be working on and support them in making good decisions about what that ought to be. Right? So as a leader, my role is to go to my team and say, "Here are the two or three - not 50 - things that, as a company, we care about. These are the most important things we can be working on." These themes drive more revenue, increase customer engagement, etc.
The team has to understand what those are so that when someone inevitably comes in from the side, saying, "Please work on my super pet project," they can have that visual model of saying, "These are the three things that I'm getting gold on. These are the three things we care about as a company." If that thing being asked for isn't on the list, they should be saying no to it.
In cases where it actually is on the list, they can say, "I’m going to consider it, but I’m not going to drop everything or take this on." There are only so many balls you can have in the air at any one time. As a leader, I have to give my team the support to make those decisions. I also have to be poking them fairly regularly in our one-on-ones, asking, "Are you being overwhelmed? Are you being asked to do stuff that's not on the core roadmap? Who's bugging you on a daily basis to get their pet project on the list?"
Then I need to go play "mother bear" with that person to stop them from doing that. That’s how we protect our teams. We’re going to disappoint people in doing that, but our teams will be better for it, the company will be better for it, and we’ll be focused on delivering the best stuff.
I think there are good forums for having a healthy debate about whether we’re working on the most valuable things for the company. We should always be prepared to defend those decisions, but we should do that in a way where it’s not coming through the side door. It should be in an open forum where we say, "Here are the 20 things we’re delivering this quarter. Please tell me why the thing you’re asking for is more important than those things."
Sometimes it is, and that’s okay. But if it’s not, then we’ll put it aside for a while and get back to it later.
Brian Flanagan is a transformational leader with extensive product management, business, ecommerce and technology innovation experience across travel, telecom, banking and consumer goods verticals. Leveraging this experience to build and motivate teams to conceive, invent and deliver integrated customer focused products that drive growth and profitability.
