Talked to a friend yesterday who runs a large team in a well-known saas company. He explained how he's staying on top of his demanding job while balancing family commitments and pursuing personal interests.
This is something all leaders struggle with, and if you're questioning yourself right now, no, you are not broken.
But we all need a system to manage it.
I've adopted some practices that help me create space to work on important opportunities while improving the way my team operates.
The guiding principle here is to have a place for every type of issue to land, where the right audience is present to debate and decide.
Here's the cadence
- Daily stand-up with directs (10 min)
- Weekly tactical staff meeting (45 min)
- Monthly ad-hoc strategy meeting (2 hr)
- Monthly exec ops review (1 hr)
- Bi-weekly 1:1s with directs
- Quarterly skip-level 1:1s w/ managers
- Small-group huddles, 2-3 team members per week
We also have working teams for
- new service offerings
- renewal forecasting
- customer health review
- concession requests, etc..
Each of these has content/agenda to accompany.
We are writing a longer piece on this topic, and I'd love to know what's working for you. We'll pick some of the top comments below and include them in the article.
