Trusting Your People
The first time I was a boss was 15 years ago, when I was 24 years old and opening my first retail store. I hired two people to help with the fit up and buying for the shop. Being young and having employees that were older than me was a tricky dynamic, and I felt like I was standing on Bambi legs most of the time.
Over time, I developed a personal management style that encouraged my team to work on their daily tasks while also owning the oversight of a part of the business they were interested in: client relations, marketing or buying. When I started, I had a much more control-oriented mindset, believing that micromanaging the concept and execution would guarantee success. I was very young — and very wrong. Once I opened up the team to have more skin in the game, giving them some structure and allowing them to develop and run with their own ideas, people started to enjoy working more. Retail can be a bear of a job, so variety was important, and I wanted my team to be engaged in their own passions as well as executing mine.
Management styles run the gamut. Ultimately it comes down to what feels the most authentic to you. However, there’s one thing that must always be considered: Building trust. Without trust, your organization sits on a house of cards.
Kelsey mentioned in our first episode of “No Surprises” that kindness and caring breed trust, and I absolutely agree. We have less of a hands-on approach for management, but we back that up with a lot of structure around accountability, and we've hit gold.
Loose structure gives your team the lanes to stay in and the space to create.
This is essentially how we built our process and approach our creative execution. A moderate structure helps people feel anchored and understand what comes next. The inbetween is where we extend our trust in return and acknowledge that with a solid set up and preparation, our team has the tools and freedom to be successful — because not every website is a one-size-fits-all solution. We have to allow room for magic.
A lot of this begins with how we hire. We are acutely aware of the most common hold ups that occur during projects, and so we have a few go-to methods that work when we are trying to problem solve. Commonly, the solutions involve personality types and skill sets that are a bit more soft than hard. Active listening, the ability to take feedback constructively and gracefully and being able to think outside the box are the top three traits that we’ve seen succeed when it comes to our team. This is not to say all people must have those characteristics in this line of work — it’s just what works best for our process and our management style.
Finally, there’s something to be said for letting go of the reins and letting your company evolve and change the way it needs to. When you are in the position of managing instead of doing, it’s really easy to assume you know best because, well, maybe you’ve been doing it alone for years. But reality tends to work a bit differently. Not being a project manager anymore means that I defer to my team on project management updates and needs. Sometimes it feels unnatural because it’s hard to let your baby partake in risky play, but it’s how we grow. Now I can honestly admit I defer to my team 100 percent of the time on solutions for things that come up, and my role is to guide them along the way.
