Articles by Dave Bailey
How to Celebrate the Small Wins in a StartupDave covers 4 ways to integrate celebrations into your culture: 1. Fridays are for Winners 2. Take a Team Trip 3. Hunt for Key Milestones 4. Spontaneous Celebration
- A Manager’s Guide to Holding Your Team Accountable
Dave provides a complete how-to-guide on holding team members to account that includes: • Why Accountability Slips • Teams Need Both Accountability And Feedback • Transitioning to Accountability/Feedback • Isn’t This Just Coaching? • What If You’re Being Held to Account? • Normalising Accountability & Feedback
- How to Motivate A Growing Startup Team
Dave explains that for knowledge work, intrinsic motivators (autonomy, mastery, purpose, relatedness) work better than extrinsic motivators (targets, bonuses, penalties, etc). He then explains these motivation methods: • How to Give Your Team Purpose • How to Give Your Team Autonomy • How to Help Your Team Master Their Role • How to Help Your Team Relate With Each Other • How Does Compensation Fit into Motivation?
- A Simple Way to Make Leadership Team Meetings Easier
Dave discusses why leadership team meetings can be difficult and suggests a simple solution to make them easier. He explains that creative problem solving requires two different cognitive processes: divergent and convergent thinking, and these processes are complementary but oppose each other. He proposes an alternative of replacing the leadership meeting with separate meetings: update (convergent thinking), retrospective (divergent thinking ending in convergence), and forum (divergent thinking ending in convergence) to foster the right mindset, stay connected, and find the convergence.
- How to Upskill Your Team (When You Don’t Have Time)
Dave covers topics such as: How to prescribe training to your team Group training
How to Delegate Work So It Actually Gets DoneDave sets some expectation with delegation (the person assigned the task may not do it as well as you!), and then six steps on how to do it right, including: 1) Delegate problems, not tasks 2) Coach, don’t instruct
- How to Organise Your Leadership Team
Dave provides a description, common metrics, and common dilemma for each of the standard functional departments at a company: Exec Team, Operations, Technology, Growth, Product, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Finance, & HR.