Management Investing: Spend Once, Earn Twice
Spending time with engineers will teach you a lot about how to better understand the concept of time and its value. In technical parlance, projects are either “cheap” or “expensive”. Meetings with a lot of engineers? Expensive. Meetings in general? Probably expensive too.
A couple years ago Navil Ravikant, AngelList Founder and a Yoda like figure in the startup ecosystem, published a viral tweet storm which you’ve probably seen about “How to Get Rich (without getting lucky)”. The 2nd tweet in the thread is here:
The concept of money (a tool to transfer time) vs. assets (things that can earn independent of time) is a great way to separate your thinking around the concept of leverage. Especially when it comes to managing teams and your time. As a manager, it’s critical to turn the idea of money (time spent) into assets (earning investments) that operate independent of your looming presence.
After all, what is true freedom? It’s the choice to spend your time and energy as you see fit, right? There are undoubtedly some projects, processes, or people that could be better invested in today to help you earn some more time back tomorrow.
As you survey your weekly or monthly responsibilities, where are the opportunities to better spend that additional time in order to “securitize” responsibilities into earning assets for tomorrow? Sorting those slices of ownership into “expensive” and “cheap” buckets might help you prioritize a list. Namely, how can you push the decision making responsibility down to your team and create an asset base that asynchronously operates with minimal intervention on your side?
Some ideas may include..
- Processes where you stand in the middle as a bottleneck
- Could you rotate the approvals? Is there a future Team Lead candidate who would love to take on the responsibility of shouldering some of these decisions?
- A consistent, low/medium risk decision making motion
- Are there things you own because “you’ve always done them”? They probably don’t need to sit with you every time. Train a team member (or committee) into learning to step in and help out. Rotate quarterly perhaps. You’ll love it, promise
- Switch up meeting cadence and ownership
- Are there expensive recurring meetings? Could they be consolidated? Rotated? Eliminated? Led by others?
- Reward high performers
- That thing you own that’s a major burden? There is definitely a hungry team member dying to take it on. Give your people some additional responsibility, they’ll love you for it
Fight hard to get leverage on your time. The reward is setting your mind (somewhat) free to do deeper work on the more important needle moving things. Allow your highly trained team to execute on areas of increasing expertise to grow their own careers.
Investing as a manager, what does that mean? Teaching your employee to fish. Turning projects, processes, and people into high flying earning assets. Teach, train, coach, hire, outsource as necessary and push down. Don’t spend your cash or your time flippantly. Invest it…wisely!