What is needed to establish trust and guide team forward?

Careers Evolve. Here I am in a completely new role. Being an exec in a small startup involves a lot of limelight and the ability to stay in and out of it. As I mentioned in my previous blog, a career coach is critical to help in this transition. Salla Gantsi, my MBA classmate and a career coach, stepped in to offer guidance on approaching day one and preparing for the step into the unknown. And what an experience it was!

What have I learned, my reflections on the coaching, and how it has helped me establish trust and guide my team forward, are what this blog covers.

Understand and define roles:

The first objective for people is to have a definitive sandbox to operate in. It defines the boundaries of what they could do to have a meaningful impact. Talk to all, get their interests aligned, understand what the organization wants, and try to match their role to the needs of the organization. Not all will get what they want, but this is the time to understand who can adapt and who cannot. Setting their roles and defining their responsibilities creates a sense of security, which is critical for any team member's success.  I looked at this as a chance to create something new, and organized the team along different functions – market seeking, product planning, and outreach/marcoms to effectively complete the product management triad. Every member knew his role, and this helped in building the team. You know why you are there.

Develop Objectives and Key Results (OKRs):

The organized team needs to know what they should do and how it connects to the bigger purpose. There are several methods to achieve this, but I found OKRs – the established framework - very useful. All members had got OKRs that were connected to the common mission of Product Management. Having a set of interleaved OKRs enables people to see how they can contribute to the larger goal and understand how they can collaborate with others to achieve their goals. This established a common language for us to work within the team. With OKRs we instituted check-ins to ensure that we were on track. Work needs to be done here, but we are making progress. 

Meetings with a purpose:

Meetings do not mean anything these days. While it is difficult to change our need to report in meetings and this is still very much a work in progress, something we are trying is to create a “3-slide” communication framework. “What should the group know?”, “What should the group decide?” and “What do I want from the group?”. This helps crystalize the thought process, makes you eliminate the noise, and express your thought succinctly. We are not there yet, but we will get there.

Count-to-10:

“For all where answers are not binary, count-to-10”, sometimes, 10 lasts a couple of days. Personally, I am learning to do this. This is something my mentor in my previous company encouraged, and I am learning to build on this. This always helps in negotiating situations where a measured answer will be appreciable.

Have fun:

We have learned to bond as a team. We organized a “marsh-mellow” challenge, found our way out of “escape rooms”, organized a book club, and ran a fantastic world-class event, as a team. The team works as one and looks after each other while having fun.

How did the coaching help

Coaching is nuanced. It is not that the results are magical on day one, but it is a shining light in situations where things are dark. During the last year, I have encountered many situations where I have thought about how should I deal with this, and an anecdote from the coaching exercise will open up a thought process.

Experienced leaders innately know what is right and wrong and possibly understand how to approach a situation, good coaching helps you translate that into action.

For me, this is a learning, a learning that will always be a continuous journey.

Additional information:

Karthikesh Raju works as SVP, Product Management and Marketing at TactoTek. Read more about the guest writer, Karthikesh Raju. 

You may also want to revisit Karthikesh first piece of reflection when he started his new role.