I had the pleasure of working with a brilliant owner of this media company, and what he did was this : he only gave me one task to focus on. Even if I asked if anything more was coming up I was told not to worry about it. He made sure everything worked out right, so truly a manager / leader in spirit.
The great thing was it created a peaceful atmosphere in the company. Focus is great, and fully agree with the article.
I remember Keith Rabois describing this to be key to Peter Thiels management philosophy at PayPal:
"So I am going to argue that you need to spend a lot of time focusing on people. This is something I learned from Peter Thiel actually. He used to insist at PayPal that every single person could only do exactly one thing. And we all rebelled, every single person in the company rebelled to this idea. Because it's so unnatural, it's so different than other companies where people wanted to do multiple things, especially as you get more senior, you definitely want to do more things and you feel insulted to be asked to do just one thing." [1]
Interesting read! And this is exactly what I learned. On the other end of the spectrum I’ve worked at companies that gave me three jobs, and a manager constantly bugging me, switching goals, scope or priorities (often after a call with a client) . And while I could certainly do it, it wasn’t very pleasant and created a stressful environment.
My work was mostly webdev, some front-end and back-end. So I’d get a project to do, and a deadline where applicable. He also really didn’t care how I did it, as long as the work got done. At first there was somewhat more briefing, before he knew my skillset, but as he learned how I worked he just trusted me to do the job.
Structure was very flat : quite a few projects worked by one person, and small teams 2-4 depending on the size or scope. When there was a specific skill we didn’t have, that task would be outsourced.
In general I guess he was just very good at optimizating for outcome.
