So, last week I got removed from one of my company’s Slack channels… and it was probably the best thing that could have happened for me, and my company.
You see, like most companies, we have ‘global’ chat channels that everyone participates in, plus each team has distinct channels usually for just those team members to discuss operational matters.
Some of our company Slack channels
Our Customer Success team has their own #customer-success channel where we would all discuss customer related issues such as onboarding new signups, and how to solve certain issues on the customer’s behalf.
As the original founder of the company, I naturally included myself in ALL our company Slack channels, because, well, I thought that is what founders had to do in order to help the team and keep a finger on the pulse of how the company was going.
But instead, that proved to be NOT a good thing. You see, I was pulled in so many different directions, and involved in so many side conversations that I couldn’t actually get my work done, which was to manage our growing development team, and set long term goals for our product.
Also, team members were getting too used to bringing problems to me directly via those channels, which meant I was the one solving a majority of them, or having to de-escalate situations depending on how important they were. This wasn’t helping our team to grow and trust themselves to make good decisions.
So my co-founder and I decided that it would be best for me to step out of the #customer-success channel. Not just mute the channel, but be removed entirely so that I am not even tempted to ‘check in’ on conversations happening there (as you can see from my screenshot here, that I can’t even see that channel any more).
It has been just over a week, and I can already see the difference. Sure there was a period of FOMO where I felt anxious that I was missing out, but based on feedback from other team members, conversations between my customer success team have increased in that channel, with a lot of questions going back and forth between each other, and ideas been thrown about with gusto and everyone is chipping in more to help each other out.
From my perspective, I have been able to focus back on pure product and leading my engineering team, and I have felt much more in control, and focused since doing so.
Don’t get me wrong - very difficult customer scenarios are still escalated to me (via other channels), but by the time that it is escalated, I know that the team has already explored all the alternatives, and it is only coming to me because it is either a bug or problem within the app itself that I need to be involved in.
A wise mentor once told me that the hardest thing for a founder to do is to make themselves obsolete in their own business, but I realise now that for a growing business, it is a necessary thing to do - and that is is major factor in building a business that can scale without you having to be involved in every minutiae, but rather be able to work on the bigger vision.
It is early days, but I think the experiment is working. Now to work on my goal of slowly get myself booted out of some of our other team channels this year. ;)