Want to run a successful business? Tips from Asana boss Justin Rosenstein

When it comes to managing a company, Justin Rosenstein knows what he’s talking about. The self-confessed teamwork obsessive has devoted his life to making collaborative working more effective, and believes it’s up to the person at the top of the ladder to make things as clear as possible for everyone under his wing.

Rosenstein - a former employee of both Google and Facebook, who founded collaborative software company Asana with Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz - emphasised this when he spoke at Dublin’s Web Summit this month. Here we summarise his inspirational speech and highlight his key tips for successfully managing a company.

How do you motivate your team to be as effective as possible and accomplish their goals? I have come to the conclusion that the primary factor for success is clarity: teams that know exactly what they’re doing, exactly why they're doing it, and exactly who is responsible for doing what, can march steadily in unison towards their goals.

The primary function of a leader is to provide their team with clarity, and to motivate and empower everyone around him with maximum clarity of purpose, clarity of plan, and clarity of responsibility.

Clarity of Purpose

Having a clear purpose as to what your company is trying to accomplish helps fuel motivation. After all, how long can you realistically work somewhere that has no clear positive impact on the world?

To see if your company has purpose, ask yourself these two questions: why does your company exist, and how will the world be different it achieves its goal? (NB: ‘I made a lot of money’ is not an answer…)

I see my job as a leader as one of constantly grounding Asana with our purpose - to help teams work together effectively and effortlessly - and showing individuals on my team how they are contributing to that purpose.

Clarity of Plan

The default state of most organisations is chaos: missed deadlines, pivoted directions, pointless meetings with no clear or actionable next step, critical tasks falling through the cracks….

At Asana we are fanatical about ensuring every single person on a team has maximum clarity of plan. We have clear goals and clear deadline dates with clear tasks and clear subtasks. Everyone has access to the plan, and everyone can see what their piece of the puzzle is, so everyone is always on the same page. When things go well, we celebrate; when things go wrong, we ask why.

Clarity of Responsibility

Each person on your team should know exactly where they belong within a company and what their responsibility is. If each wheel turns properly and exactly, the mechanism will work. Break your plan into pieces and make one person, not two, responsible for each of those pieces. Make these pieces public.

You’re not there to dictate how people get work done, you’re there to distribute it, and then give people trust and space to deliver it. Your function as a leader is to advise, to coach, to serve and to provide people with resources they need, check up on them and evaluate their success. Trust people or replace them, but do not meddle.

As a leader your job is to empower everyone around you. How? With maximum clarity. Maintaining clarity is the main habit of managing successful companies. It’s the difference between having great dreams and doing great things.

Watch Rosenstein’s whole talk at Web Summit here: