Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Key Takeaways
- Directly observing your team’s work helps leaders understand the real challenges, decisions and context they face.
- Monitoring a team is about more than measuring performance KPIs. Personal observation reveals important factors like emotions, relationships and team dynamics that numbers alone can’t capture.
- Whether in leadership or parenting, actively engaging in what matters to people leads to stronger relationships and better guidance.
Being a CEO is my full-time job, but I’m also a full-time dad. Raising a child is much different from growing a business, so I typically try to compartmentalize these roles. But sometimes they converge in valuable ways. Parenting is a type of mentorship, after all, and mentorship is integral to effective leadership. Anything I do to help my children improve skills or solve problems usually becomes something I can bring to work.
Here’s an example: Every fall, I volunteer as the videographer for my son’s high school football team. This is personally fulfilling for a few reasons. Not only do I get to spend time with him and his friends, but I also get to be a geek about cinematography and video editing, which are personal passions of mine.
I love technology, which is how I ended up leading one of the industry’s largest power dialing platforms, so it’s nice to tinker with cameras and lenses in my spare time. But observing the team’s games has also helped hone my eye for detail, deepen my understanding of how social dynamics impact team performance and allow me to recognize which moments truly matter — in a game, a day at the office, and my life as a whole.
Documenting and reviewing is not just for your direct reports
Before I started shooting games for the team, I’d often rely on what I could see from the bleachers to tell me how things were going. That bird’s-eye view lets you witness plays, downs and touchdowns — but it doesn’t put you close enough to the players to fully understand their experience.
A running back might have a plan in mind when they catch a pass, but if they spot an opposing player closing in on them from the corner of their eye, they have to adapt. An audience member might think they’re deviating from the plan, but they can’t see what the player sees.
When I started viewing games through my zoom lens, it did more than get me closer to the action. It gave me proximity to the problems players faced, and that gave me deeper insight into the decisions they made.
It’s the same at PhoneBurner. Many leaders prefer to delegate process documentation and review to middle management, but I’ve never been comfortable with such a hands-off approach. I started my career in tech by tinkering in my workshop, and that’s still largely how I operate.
Summaries are great for saving time, but they miss details. When I assess the success of an update based on a secondhand account, I can’t consider anything my direct reports chose to leave out. When I’ve personally observed the work, I can provide more informed feedback because I’ve seen the same details my team sees.
Observing projects is about more than monitoring performance
When a play succeeds or fails, it’s not always a reflection of the strategy involved. Sometimes it’s about whether the right people were put in the right positions or how well certain personalities were able to work together.
I see more than just strategy when I film my son’s games. I see the emotion behind the game and the relationships that make up the team. I see the sweat beading on the kicker’s brow that tells me he’s nervous before a punt, or the glares shot between two linebackers that let me know the personal friction between them is going to impact their ability to form a cohesive defense.
My point is, monitoring a team is about more than measuring performance KPIs. It also has the ability to teach you invaluable lessons about talent and culture. A scorecard full of metrics can help you understand how efficient an employee is, but it can’t tell you about their character or whether they’re experiencing issues with one of their coworkers that might be holding back their collaboration. You need to personally be able to observe their work if you want those kinds of insights.
Setting the right priorities depends on your ability to notice things
But let’s zoom out for a second.
The most important thing about filming my son’s football games hasn’t been that I’ve gained an appreciation for gridiron tactics, or that I’ve learned downstream lessons that have made me a more observant CEO. It’s that I’ve gotten to know him better by being involved in his passions.
I know how much he loves the game. I know how much he values his friends. And I know what kind of man he’s becoming. That’s worth the world to me.
You can never fully appreciate the things you’re not involved in. That’s true whether you’re a parent or not, but it has special significance to me as a father. It’s mission-critical for me to stay looped in on what’s happening at PhoneBurner, but it’s personally critical for me to be close to my kid and see the world through his eyes. That doesn’t just make it easier for me to understand what he’s going through today. It also helps me participate effectively in planning for his future.
So don’t be afraid to get closer to what matters to you. It’s not going to make you too invested or less objective. It’s going to make you more invested and more aware. Which is what every great role model, at home or in the workplace, needs to be.
Key Takeaways
- Directly observing your team’s work helps leaders understand the real challenges, decisions and context they face.
- Monitoring a team is about more than measuring performance KPIs. Personal observation reveals important factors like emotions, relationships and team dynamics that numbers alone can’t capture.
- Whether in leadership or parenting, actively engaging in what matters to people leads to stronger relationships and better guidance.
Being a CEO is my full-time job, but I’m also a full-time dad. Raising a child is much different from growing a business, so I typically try to compartmentalize these roles. But sometimes they converge in valuable ways. Parenting is a type of mentorship, after all, and mentorship is integral to effective leadership. Anything I do to help my children improve skills or solve problems usually becomes something I can bring to work.
Here’s an example: Every fall, I volunteer as the videographer for my son’s high school football team. This is personally fulfilling for a few reasons. Not only do I get to spend time with him and his friends, but I also get to be a geek about cinematography and video editing, which are personal passions of mine.
I love technology, which is how I ended up leading one of the industry’s largest power dialing platforms, so it’s nice to tinker with cameras and lenses in my spare time. But observing the team’s games has also helped hone my eye for detail, deepen my understanding of how social dynamics impact team performance and allow me to recognize which moments truly matter — in a game, a day at the office, and my life as a whole.