Couple months back, I led a small team to design a logo, just three of us.
That was quite simple.
I break down the process, see how can we contribute to each part, and then start communicating it to the team.
In the 70% progress of the project, things started to be clear what I’ve been doing to this team.
The moment was when I told them to do a bit of research for the style we want to go with the logo, I didn’t expect that they would deliver a high-quality detail breakdown.
That made me realize that the thing that I may be able to learn by myself can be an opportunity to receive a different kind of perspective if done by others.
Not only does this affect the project’s quality but also increases the self-ownership of team members. They spent time working on it, directly making input, making them don’t want the project to be bad — sunk cost fallacy.
The takeaways from this story:
Trust your team — I know oftentimes we might be afraid of letting someone do the work cause it may risk making the output bad, but you need to think of it as a challenge rather than a constraint, if you do it right, you leverage the next projects, it’s an investment.
Be clear on what type of input is needed for the project and set a “learning” project for the team — Each people have a different way of learning something which means different input when asked for. This is one of the most fascinating things in working collaboratively.
Give prompts — Learning the right way is always up to them, learning the right thing is our job as a leader. Set clear tasks, questions, and problems to solve.