Team Management: Helping Others Grow

This article is Lu Canwei's 65th original piece.

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Many times, success is not an individual achievement, but a collective one.

Many friends who know me should be aware that I have had an unpleasant entrepreneurial experience. However, I believe many fellow entrepreneurs have also gone through similar situations where various interests among partners led to a breakdown in relationships.

Often, when there is no way out, everyone moves in the same direction and is willing to endure hardships together. But if there are choices, it becomes different. Originally, when a loaf of bread is divided into several pieces, everyone feels satisfied with what they have, but then suddenly realizes they could have meat instead. Consequently, some want chicken, while others want beef, making it difficult to reach a consensus.

Although many people suggest methods like having a veto vote or making the founder the major shareholder, having a strong early team is far more important.

I may have digressed a bit, but today I mainly want to discuss how to help team members grow.

Without trust, it becomes difficult for everyone to collaborate. For instance, if you assign a task to a team member and suspect they might slack off, you might think of various ways to monitor them. For example, you might walk around them from time to time or check if they are at their desk after work hours. This is the most basic level of management because I cannot evaluate your work, so I can only assess your time spent.

Another common scenario is when you say a task will take two weeks, and the leader directly states it should be done in one week, giving you only a week to complete it.

I once had a memorable experience right after I had surgery. During that time, I tried to ensure I got enough rest, but my new leader came to ask me why I left work right after hours.

I remember when I was leading a team at Ele.me, many team members had little work experience. As a senior developer, I thought, "Wow, your development efficiency is too low; it should be done this way." In the end, I rolled up my sleeves and created frameworks for them to build upon. The result was predictable; I often worked until 2-3 AM, and at times until noon the next day, with team members not growing much, except for thinking I was impressive.

In my subsequent work, I often reflected that my individual success does not bring much value. Even if I can handle three people’s work, that is my limit. So, what about twenty people?

I believe everyone has heard life advice from those who have gone before them when they were young. Most people, including myself, scoffed at it, thinking, "I am the master of my life; why should I listen to you?"

When you become that experienced person, you will find that today’s young people are just like you were back then. There are many things you know will likely fail in the end, yet you must allow your team members to make mistakes to the greatest extent possible.

Because if they do not gain experience directly, what they see others say or what is written in books will not become their experience. In other words, you cannot replicate your experience.

Times are always changing. The Earth was once thought to be flat, and bloodletting was believed to cure diseases; these ideas have disappeared into the annals of history. Even if they were correct at the time, they may not be correct now.

Just like the technological architecture of the internet, when I first started working, everything was about large architectures, with all functions centralized in one service. Now, various companies are starting to adopt microservices. So which is correct? From a conclusion standpoint, both are correct.

Back then, there were no cloud services or containerization; all services needed to be deployed on physical machines. It was common to run to the server room due to a wrong command. From a marginal cost perspective, centralized systems had lower marginal costs than distributed ones. But now, I can add a cloud server at any time and quickly deploy services through containerization, eliminating the marginal cost advantage of centralization, replaced instead by the other benefits brought by microservices.

However, in recent years, there has been a push for middle platforms again.

Therefore, we must allow team members to make mistakes, letting them gain experience and grow through practice. What you need to do is to suggest and share your experiences and judgments when they are in doubt, serving as a source for their decision-making, because you know that even if they mess up, you can cover for them.

In the end, this should be the beginning of a series; there is no right or wrong, just sharing some of my experiences over the years.

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