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Key Takeaways Directly observing your team’s work helps leaders understand the real challenges, decisions and context they face.
Monitoring a team is about more than measuring performance KPIs. Personal observation reveals important factors like emotions, relationships and team dynamics that numbers alone can’t capture.
Whether in leadership or parenting, actively engaging in what matters to people leads to stronger relationships and better guidance.
Being a CEO is my full-time job, but I’m also a full-time dad. Raising a child is much different from growing a business, so I typically try to compartmentalize these roles. But sometimes they converge in valuable ways. Parenting is a type of mentorship, after all, and mentorship is integral to effective leadership. Anything I do to help my children improve skills or solve problems usually becomes something I can bring to work.
Here’s an example: Every fall, I volunteer as the videographer for my son’s high school football team. This is personally fulfilling for a few reasons. Not only do I get to spend time with him and his friends, but I also get to be a geek about cinematography and video editing, which are personal passions of mine.
I love technology, which is how I ended up leading one of the industry’s largest power dialing platforms, so it’s nice to tinker with cameras and lenses in my spare time. But observing the team’s games has also helped hone my eye for detail, deepen my understanding of how social dynamics impact team performance and allow me to recognize which moments truly matter — in a game, a day at the office, and my life as a whole.
Documenting and reviewing is not just for your direct reports
Before I started shooting games for the team, I’d often rely on what I could see from the bleachers to tell me how things were going. That bird’s-eye view lets you witness plays, downs and touchdowns — but it doesn’t put you close enough to the players to fully understand their experience.
A running back might have a plan in mind when they catch a pass, but if they spot an opposing player closing in on them from the corner of their eye, they have to adapt. An audience member might think they’re deviating from the plan, but they can’t see what the player sees.
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