People Management as a Platform

A few weeks ago, I took on leading a new team. It’s been a steep personal growth curve, and it constantly triggers many new insights. One very powerful has been to see myself as a platform builder.

In the internet business scene, platforms have been all the rage for the last decade. I still remember vividly when I read Platform Revolution in 2016. It completely changed my understanding of how the non-profit I was leading at the time was operating. Moving forward I looked for platform opportunities in every industry. I realized that not everything in our world can be done as a platform. A platform does not generate the core value of a product or a service. This is the production of a piece of music, the writing of a book, or the creation of unique meals. The true power of a platform is in empowering individuals and organizations by allowing them to leverage their skills in completely new ways to bring value to others. If set up right, it does so at scale for thousands and millions of people.

Let’s take the platform concept in the people management realm.

As a leader, I want to build a platform for my people to do their best and most impactful work. My management knowledge, tools, and skills, as well as deep context understanding, are what make up the platform infrastructure. My platform services are 1:1s, development talks, team spaces, trainings, connections to stakeholders, PR work for individuals and team, as well as, coaching and consulting on how to have the biggest impact in our organization and beyond.

My value proposition to teams I lead and organizations I work for lies in truly understanding and developing the individuals’ potential, connecting the strengths across the team for some more powerful, and understanding our internal and external context in and out. This last piece is critical! Without understanding the context, you cannot deliver great value to the team. Your value proposition, tools, and services will be too generic. Specificity is the key to greatness.

Instead of spending my energy on specific pieces of the business, I focus my energy on building and growing the platform for my team. The better my people management platform, the better its services, the more impact my team will have. Success is then only a side result of how good of a platform I’m building.

This takes me back to my prelude. Focus on process over results. I admit, after years of people telling me “results over process” it took me a while to get used to this view. But now I see it’s power. Our business is very complex, pieces are constantly moving. Trying to be focused on all the pieces will not allow me to leverage my role to the fullest. So I will focus instead on the process of building the best possible people management platform — for my specific context first and then in general. Focus on people, the impact will follow.

So I proudly declare: I’m in the business of building platforms for people to do their life’s best and most impactful work :)