Leadership - Roivant IT Handbook

Managers of One

In distributed organization, we want each team member to be a manager of one. A manager of one is an attribute associated with our Efficiency value. To be successful in Roivant IT, team members need to develop their daily priorities to achieve goals. Managers of one set the tone for their work, assign items and determine what needs to get done. No matter what role you serve, self-leadership is an essential skill needed to be successful as a manager of one.

In Roivant IT, leadership is requested from everyone, whether an individual contributor or member of the leadership team.
As a leader, Roivant IT team members will follow your behavior, so always do the right thing.
Everyone who joins Roivant IT should consider themselves ambassadors of our values.
Behavior should be consistent inside and outside the company. We do the right thing outside the company, too.
Roivant IT respects your judgment of what is best for you, since you know yourself best. If you have a better opportunity somewhere else don’t stay at Roivant out of a sense of loyalty to the company.
In tough times people will put in their best effort when they are doing it for each other.
We work asynchronously. Lead by example and make sure people understand that things need to be written down in issues as they happen.
We are not a consensus driven company. People are encouraged to give their comments and opinions, and they will be heard and considered, but in the end one person decides the matter after they have listened to all the feedback.
It is encouraged to disagree and have constructive debates but please argue intelligently.
We value truth seeking over cohesion.
We avoid meetings, when possible, because they don’t support the asynchronous work flow and are hard to conduct due to timezone differences.
Start meetings on time, be on time yourself, don’t ask if everyone is there, and don’t punish people that have shown up on time by waiting for people or repeating things for those that come late. When a meeting unblocks a process or decision, don’t celebrate that but instead address the question: How can we unblock in the future without needing a meeting?
We give feedback, lots of it. Don’t hold back on suggestions for improvements.
Focus on improvement. If you meet external people, always ask what they think we should improve.
Following from Paul Graham’s advice: Strive to make the organization simpler.
Saying something to the effect of “as you might have heard”, “unless you’ve been living in a cage you know”, “as everyone knows”, or “as you might know” is toxic. The people that know don’t need it to be said. The people that don’t know feel like they missed something and might be afraid to ask about the context.
Don’t use someone else’s name, remind people of your title, or otherwise “pull rank” to get things done.
Act as a CEO of yourself and your role by taking responsibility to set goals and appropriate timelines.
Communicate clearly with your team and people leader on the status of your goals. Act quickly to address areas that pose a challenge or to reassess goals that cannot be reached in an allotted timeframe.

Examples of actions from managers of one at Roivant

When asked to attend a synchronous brainstorming call, a team member instead opens an issue and requests for their team’s ideas asynchronously.
A people leader champions our value of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging by becoming a mentor.
A team member blocks out dedicated time for learning and development to implement a regular practice of self-serving and self-learning.
A team member in a new role finds an inefficiency in a process they are learning. Without being asked or supervised, they open a merge request (MR) proposing a change and assign it to their manager for review.
When a scheduled meeting agenda is complete 10 minutes before the call is set to end, an attendee ends the call early.
A people leader hires a new team member that demonstrates our CREDIT values.
Before asking for others’ time to discuss a topic, they dedicate time to process their thoughts and make a proposal.
A manager of one prioritizes wellbeing by blocking their calendars for fitness, meals, paid time off, and personal appointments.
A team member surfaces blockers as opposed to assuming their manager or team is already aware, and simultaneously works to unblock others by working in public and with a low level of shame.

Making decisions

Please see the Making Decisions Leadership page.

Communication should be direct, not hierarchical

Most companies communicate from top to bottom through a chain of command. This communication flow often empowers managers, but it also introduces inefficiency as team members are not able to connect directly with the people they need to communicate with in order to get their work done. In Roivant IT, every team member is encouraged to reach out to whoever is the correct person (or people) to quickly unblock issues, solve problems or support in other ways. Do be courteous of your direct manager and copy them on the request. We don’t encourage unnecessary friction in asking team members to escalate through managers and wait for responses to come back. What matters is efficiency in getting to results. Slack the CIO, Slack a VP, or Slack a peer. Do what you need to do to make Roivant successful.

Managers should not be bottlenecks or silos for communication. Anyone should feel comfortable reaching out to anyone else with the best information they can to solve a problem. This is a more efficient, transparent, and collaborative way to work.

Giving Feedback

Giving regular feedback is extremely important for both managers and team members. Feedback can take the form of coaching sessions, separate from 1-to-1 meetings. Giving feedback is also about being prepared and, depending on the situation, you should create separate agendas and structure them as follows:

Provide context
Use a framework for your feedback. Examples: 1) Two Areas: Praise (What’s working well) and Tips (What could be done differently) or 2), Three Areas: Start, Stop, Continue
Ask yourself, is this ASK?:
- Actionable
- Specific
- Kind (Does the feedback help the person? Note: Being kind is not the same as being nice.)
- Objective (similar to Fair)
- Relevant to the job role

Identifying root causes

Sometimes when performance dips, the best way to tackle it is to try to determine the root cause. This is easier said than done. There is a great tool that CEB (now Gartner) created to help with this called performance issue root cause diagnostic. It may not always be possible or appropriate to determine the root cause, so the underperformance process should be followed.

Responding to Negative Feedback

As a leader, the way you respond to negative feedback makes a significant impact on your team. Remember that it can be difficult for people to approach someone in authority with concerns and respond with sensitivity and appreciation. In particular, we recommend that you keep the following in mind:

Don’t argue or get defensive. Accept the feedback for what it is: an attempt to help you improve your work or your professional relationships. If you do have to explain yourself, try to remain empathetic.
It’s fine (even preferable) to defer action. When presented with negative feedback, we often feel like we have to either justify our actions or promise change, and since change isn’t always easy when you’re responsible for a large team, justification becomes the default. It’s OK to say you need time to evaluate the feedback and decide how to proceed.
The Right Way to Respond to Negative Feedback
If a team member from your department or another part of the org comes to you and says they do not feel like they or their reports’ contributions are valued by your reports, the manager should try to resolve this. Research shows that this is more likely to happen to underrepresented minorities. Please note that DRIs are free to ignore feedback without acknowledging it and that valuing contributions isn’t the same as agreeing with them. This is about co-opting someone else’s idea without attribution and/or dismissing an idea with an ad-hominem remark.

Coaching

What is coaching?

Coaching is about helping others help themselves. It is not about giving advice, instruction, or telling someone what to do. Coaching is about focusing on the future and identifying where the coachee wants to be and what they want to achieve. In Roivant IT, we’ve defined coaching as a conversation that helps people think for themselves, find their own answers, and commit to action they design. As a coach, your role is to clarify the pathway from the current state to the future. Coaches do this by enabling the coachee to make informed choices based on deeper insight.

No matrix organization

We believe everyone deserves to report to exactly one person that knows and understands what you do day to day. The benefit of having a technically competent manager is easily the largest positive influence on a typical worker’s level of job satisfaction. We have a simple functional hierarchy, everyone has one manager that is experienced in their subject matter. Matrix organizations or dotted lines are too hard to get right.
We don’t want a matrix organization where you work with a lead day to day but formally report to someone else.
The advantage of a functional structure is that you get better feedback and training since your manager understands your work better than a general manager.
For the organization, forgoing a separate class of managers ensures a simple structure with clear responsibilities.
A functional organization structure mimics the top structure of our organizations (Finance, Sales, Engineering, etc.).
It reduces compensation costs, coordination costs, and office politics.
The disadvantage is that your manager has a limited amount of time for you and probably has less experience managing people.
To mitigate these disadvantages we should offer ample training, coaching, support structures, and processes to ensure our managers can handle these tasks correctly and in a limited amount of time.
Everyone deserves a great manager that helps them with their career. A manager should hire a great team, should let you know when to improve, motivate and coach you to get the best out of you.
“Nuke all matrices. Nuke all dual reporting structures. And nuke as many shared services functions as you possibly can.” from the great guide to big companies from Marc Andreessen (the other guides are awesome too).
We recommend reading High Output Management, and its author coined Grove’s law: All large organizations with a common business purpose end up in a hybrid organizational form. We believe a dual reporting structure is inevitable, we just want to delay it as long as possible.
Whenever there is need to work on a specific, high-level, cross functional business problem, we can assemble a balanced team.
Having functional managers means that they are rarely spending 100% of their time managing. They always get their hands dirty. Apart from giving them relevant experience, it also focuses them on the output function more than the process. Hopefully both the focus and not having a lot of time for process reduces the amount of politics.

Factory vs. studio

We want the best combination of a factory and a studio. The studio element means anyone can chime in about anything, from a user to the CEO. You can step outside your work area and contribute. The factory element means everyone has a clearly assigned task and authority.

Process gets a bad rep

Process has a bad reputation. It has that reputation for things that we try to avoid doing at Roivant. When you have processes that are not needed it turns into a bureaucracy. A good example are approval processes. We should keep approval processes to a minimum, by both giving people the authority to make decisions by themselves and by having a quick lightweight approval process where needed.

But process also has good aspects. Having a documented process for how to communicate within the company greatly reduces time spend on on-boarding, increases speed, and prevents mistakes. A counterintuitive effect is that it also makes it easier to change processes. It is really hard to change a process that doesn’t have a name or location and lives in different versions in the heads of people. Changing a written process and distributing the diff is much easier.

Talent Acquisition and retention

Managers have an tremendous responsibility around talent acquisition and retention of team members.

Voluntary departures should be low, especially unexpected ones. The most common reasons for resignations can be tied back to the manager.
We want few candidates to decline an offer, especially when the reason isn’t compensation.
We need adequate candidate pipeline volume and quality, especially for crucial positions.
Candidates that have a proposed offer should meet the bar, especially for more senior positions.

Building High Performing Teams

Building a team to deliver results is a very important aspect of improving efficiency and iteration. A high-performing team will always deliver results. As a leader in Roivant IT, your role is to develop a high-performing team to reach the desired level of performance and productivity. There are certain traits that high-performing teams display at Roivant:

Have a clear vision of their objectives and goals
Stay committed to achieving their goals
Manage conflicts
Maintain effective communication and a healthy relationship with each other
Make unanimous decisions as a team

Skills and behavior of building high performing teams competency for Managers:

Models and encourages teamwork by fostering collaboration, communication, trust, shared goals, mutual accountability and support
Fosters an environment where results are balanced with time management of multiple assignments and DRI’s on important topics
Empowers team members to be a Manager of One and gives them the tools to grow professionally in their careers
Attracts and retains top talent by creating an inclusive environment built on trust, delegation, accountability, and teachability

Strategies to Build High Performing Teams

The Drexler-Sibbet Team Performance Model is an excellent tool to help build high performing teams in Roivant IT. The model provides a roadmap for a team and a common language. It is a simplified description of how a team works together that highlights the most important things the team needs to focus on to reach high performance. In Roivant IT, we can use it as a frame of reference to developing high performing teams. It can help Managers ensure new and existing team members know the mission and direction of the team by the following:

To form your team
To guide what your team does
To monitor how well your team is doing
to diagnose where your team may be struggling or identify the keys to your team’s success

7 Stages to developing high performing teams:

Orientation - Why are we here? Team members need to see a sense of team identity and how individual team members fit in.
Trust Building

- Who are you? Team members share mutual regard for each other and are open and supportive of trust-based relationships.
Goal Clarification - What are we doing? Assumptions are made clear; individual assumptions are made known with a clear vision of the end state.
Commitment - How will we do it? Team members understand how it will make decisions and do the work.
Implementation - Who does what, when, where? Team members have a sense of clarity and can operate effectively due to the alignment of shared goals.
High Performance - Wow! The team is accomplishing more than it expected. The team has taken off, creativity is fostered and goals are surpassed.
Renewal - Why continue? The team is given recognition and celebrates achievements of individuals that produce valuable work. Reflect on lessons learned and reassess for the future.

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