Leadership roles (LRs) come in a few flavors. They may be the leader of a team. They might be regularly involved with high-level (company) decision-making.
Those in LRs ideally have strong ability in multiple relevant areas of the team or area they’re working with (e.g. linguistics, Japanese, English, programming, marketing, product, etc). It will depend on the group what kind of expertise will be more or less valued. LRs should also embody the leadership competency traits.
Our LRs are a little different from typical management positions. First of all, LRs shouldn’t have to micromanage or tell other roles on their team how to do something. Those roles should have ownership over that, and the LR is just there to coordinate, prioritize, connect the dots, and help other roles when needed. In other words, they serve the team in figuring out what the team should do. They don’t tell individuals how to do the work to get there, though.
The goal is for LRs to spend around 10-20 hours per week doing LR-related work. Some weeks will be less than that, some more (e.g. at the end of a quarter, when they need to collect and write OKRs). It will vary from LR to LR, as well as the team, but the idea if everybody on the team is given ownership, and if ‣ are well defined, a lot of the time a manager normally spends can be spent on more progress-driving work. Most LRs, in addition to their leadership role, will have another role at reduced hours.
Here’s what LRs primarily do:
LRs help to say “this is important” and “this isn’t important,” in relation to current Company Goals, Team Goals, and the Company Mission. They help people to stay focused on what is most progress-driving at the moment.
LRs play a large role in their team’s hiring. That includes writing cards for ‣, writing job listings, going through applications, performing interviews, and participating in hiring decisions. LRs are expected to be experts in the hiring processes in the ‣.
LRs should embody Tofugu’s values and principles, acting as a good example for everyone on their team. Then, they should hold others to that high standard as well.
LRs should frequently give feedback, and expect others to do the same. LRs need to speed up the feedback loop on improvement and be on the lookout for positive (and negative) trends.
LRs should audit the work of team members as well. Work quality should improve over time. Any problems in quality should be spotted and fixed quickly.
In coordination with ‣, LRs need to do some big-picture decision making. They should be able to provide recommendations to Vision for what the team should do, within the context of Company Goals and the Company Mission, along with a strong thought process on how they got there.
The LR is responsible for learning and understanding the team’s input metrics (things we can change that we have direct control over, such as design, content, ordering, etc), as well as how they effect the output metrics (things we don’t have direct control over, such as revenue, number of reviews, user level, etc). They should use this to help make recommendations and decisions for the team and product.
LRs work with ‣ to develop and decide on their team’s OKRs. To do this, an LR needs to constantly be aware of the team’s priorities in relation to Company Goals. Then they should write OKR pitches and lobby for their team’s priorities.