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One of the most rewarding feelings is when your team independently builds things better than you could have ever imagined. It truly feels like magic.
If I had to distill my management philosophy into a set of actions, it’d be this: hire amazing people, give them a lot of responsibility and autonomy, set the direction and provide context, create feedback loops, then get out of the way and let them cook.
Of course, it’s never that simple. Reality is messy and people are people, with all their beautiful idiosyncrasies. But that core belief (set a clear direction, then let people figure out how to get there) guides how I lead.
Everything about management gets easier when you hire amazing people. The more experience I’ve gained, the more I appreciate just how critical it is to invest in effective hiring. Here’s why:
My hiring process is rigorous by design and refined over years. And the best candidates appreciate it — they know that high standards mean they’ll be working with other high performers.
Amazing people want to do amazing work. One of the most powerful motivators I’ve found is to trust people with significant responsibility. The best people don’t just rise to the challenge, they want it. They take joy in solving hard problems and won’t let their team down when entrusted with meaningful work.
Trusting your team with a significant responsibility isn’t just highly motivating, it’s a necessity to scaling a company. There’s a quote that’s stuck with me (though I forget where I first heard it): “You should aim to fire yourself every 6 to 12 months.” In other words, my role must continuously evolve. If I’m still doing what I was doing a year ago, I’m probably a bottleneck. So I’m constantly looking for chances to hand off responsibility to my team.
However, a lot of responsibility must be paired with a lot of autonomy — there is no surer way to burn someone out than to give them highly demanding work with no control.
Plus, autonomy is the engine of innovation. When you’re building something fundamentally new, no single person has all the answers. I certainly don’t. So I empower every team member with the freedom to figure out how they’ll tackle their challenges. That’s how you build novel solutions: by unleashing the creativity of a diverse, skilled team.
Autonomy only works when there’s alignment. A team rowing in different directions makes a lot of noise and expends a lot of effort but goes nowhere. My job, therefore, is to clarify the direction: long-term vision, short-term goals, business context, and the standards for how we execute. I’m responsible for the what and the why — the team owns the how.
Our short-term goals are framed as operational initiatives. For each one, the person owning that initiative is responsible for writing up answers to the following questions, then sharing for feedback with key stakeholders:
For context-sharing, I use our daily standup to talk about what I’m hearing from customers and other teams, what I anticipate in the coming months, and how these fit into our strategic goals. As a company, we also have a weekly Town Hall for the entire company, where we’re highly transparent at every level about what’s happening across the organization to equip everyone at Leverege with important context.
Until recently, however, our team didn’t have a long-term vision nor a set or standards for how we execute our work. In March, our team convened in Seattle to work in-person for a week and, during this mini team meetup, we created both.
Our Vision
We’re building the blueprint for how the most effective companies of the future will operate—where remote work isn’t just effective, but a strategic advantage that outperforms in-person work. Where the most talented people and the most effective technologies combine to achieve ambitious business goals and drive sustainable growth. And where people are empowered to do their best, most meaningful work. We are Leverege’s force multiplier, delivering 10x the impact per person while keeping empathy and humanity at our core.
Our Principles
Articulating the vision and principles of your team is useless without feedback loops. Otherwise, how do we know that we’re actually achieving our goals? How do I know that our team’s principles are being enacted effectively in practice? As a manager, building feedback loops enables you to identify if there are gaps between the efforts of your team and the intended outcomes and, if so, why.
Early in my management career, I didn’t build effective feedback loops — and it showed. For example, we once struggled to maintain and improve systems other operators had built. I’d talked about the importance of simplicity and future-proofing (now captured in principles #8 and #9), but I hadn’t defined what that actually looked like in practice.
To fix this, we created "Build Reviews," inspired by code reviews. Whenever someone builds or updates a system, another operator reviews it for maintainability, logic, and ease of future improvements. No one’s exempt — if I build something, someone reviews it.
Providing ad-hoc feedback on a regular basis to your direct reports is a key skill of great managers (Corey explores this in his post Kind, Clear, and Candid: A Better Way to Lead Remote Teams), but feedback loops are a special form of feedback. A feedback loop can take many forms, like the Build Review described above or a weekly meeting to review key business metrics, but the common thread is that feedback loops are a repeatable process to surface insights that increase alignment with goals/principles and accelerate growth.
Done well, feedback loops become self-perpetuating. Amazing people want to improve themselves and they want to build things that contribute value to the company, so if you build effective feedback loops, your team will be excited to use them. I initially conducted all Build Reviews while we got the process up and running, but today the operations team independently (and enthusiastically) creates and conducts Build Reviews with each other, many of which I’m not involved in at all.
This is the fun part, and why I love working to grow Leverege. One of the most rewarding feelings is when your team independently builds things better than you could have ever imagined. It truly feels like magic, and it’s something you only get when you assemble a group of amazing people, trust them with significant responsibility and autonomy, align them with shared goals and principles, set up feedback loops, then let them surprise you.
And I’m proud to say, this isn’t just true of our ops team. It’s true across Leverege.
If you’re someone who wants to do meaningful work, take ownership, and grow alongside people who push you to be better — you’ll thrive here.
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