I am not the first person to say this: culture is both hard to describe and influence. But I believe I have an interesting way to go about trying. I was recently asked about cultural differences between the companies I have worked for which is making me rethink how to answer that question by answering this question. 

How do ideas move through the company? 

If you objectively think and write down an answer, you can begin to describe the culture of a company. 

The most recent idea started from the executive team. The CEO asked for this so we went and executed the idea. The idea did not produce the results we expected. This would be a culture that is authoritarian and submissive. 

Another way an idea moves through the organization. Let’s keep it with the idea coming from the CEO. But now someone takes the idea and converses with three peers, stakeholders, or team members about it. Then throws it outside the company walls to a few users or industry experts. Using these discussions and data research, the person comes back with a recommendation and proposal on if and how to execute this idea. Some themes that emerge are teamwork, curiosity, conviction, thoughtfulness, and focus. 

Rooted in these quick examples are decisions and behaviors by people within the company that ultimately make up the culture.

The biggest mistake I see people make in the first 3-6 yrs of their career is not getting good at weekly/daily prioritization that supports their team/business. I needed to improve at this myself at various times of my career. It became hard to make time to truly prioritize work. The truth is you have more autonomy over what you decide to do than you think. It starts with organizing your weeks in a way that works. As you organize, share bits and pieces of that organization with your manager and team. Make your personal weekly planning trickle into updates so you are putting it into action. There’s research that telling someone you are going to do something increases the odds you will do it – you become more accountable to doing it. Here’s a few other habits to build for good weekly/daily planning: 

• Make time every Monday morning to plan your week.
• Make big rocks and put tasks under the big rocks. Big rocks should be things that tie to the team’s strategy. 
• Do not share laundry lists with your manager. You aren’t doing anything to make things easy on them. They probably want to know about all these things but you need to present in a more organized fashion. 
• Always remember it is okay to roll tasks over into the next day. 

Thankfully, I have learned the lesson of owning my priorities and calendar and hoping to help others get there too. When you find what works for you, you will feel the right amount of control and autonomy you want with spontaneity mixed in. 

Progressing in your career to higher level roles often means the levels of complexity that you are dealing with increase. I’ve found the best product and marketing leaders are the most effective because they’re handling their levels of complexity in ways that produce value to their organization. You will know someone handles levels of complexity well from working directly with them and seeing it yourself or hearing from others how good that person is at breaking down a complex problem or opportunity in a compelling way and influencing people to solve it. 

Individual Contributors Remit:

• Weekly Tasks 
• Manager Communication
• 1-3 Stakeholders 

Leader’s Remit:  

• Direct Team & Cross-Functional Team 
• Stakeholders and Peers 
• Multi Year Strategy & Quarterly Execution 

The contrast in these two remits shows the added complexity a leader takes on. Each bullet requires leading & managing more people. The strategy is critical to nail down and get support on, then the execution needs to be done by others and you need to find effective ways to check in and add feedback. You will also need to pick the places where you get your hands dirty which has to be chosen wisely. 

When my remit started to get broader, I was pretty bad at managing layers of complexity. I was able to lean on my expertise in my domain which helped but I had to learn a lot of important lessons and still am regarding management, relationships, and strategy. Here’s a few:

• You can’t do all the execution anymore. Practice delegating and specifically asking for things. It’s okay to be really prescriptive and let people give you feedback to pull back. 
• Ask really thoughtful questions to get better answers.  
• Set up a mechanism for weekly project updates that are used in weekly discussions to highlight progress and blockers. Makes convos more fluid. 
• Set up 1:1s with key people and have 1:1 docs to riff on ideas during the call…it is good to put the notes in a place both people can read them. 
• Have a robust weekly/daily planning process for yourself. Allow room for flexibility but stick to getting the high leverage stuff done each week. 
• Prioritize high leverage tasks in a week such as strategy document, project document or test spec. 
• Don’t be all business all the time. At the end of the day, it’s about the relationships and skills you’re developing that is important.
• Make time to innovate and think.

I remember early in my career working on a client project that was going off the rails a bit in terms of many deliverables on deck and there was a bit of chaos brewing. The client lead came into the room where myself and a team member were trying to talk out what’s going on. The leader diffused the problem and simplified the actions with command. That’s a micro moment but great example of a leader handling levels of complexity well (multiple team members, multiple deliverables, and the clients success and happiness). 

What have you found to be helpful in managing levels of complexity in effective ways that add value?