Do I need to involve myself in everything my team does?

Sometimes the responsibility that you hold comes with a serving of just sit back and shut the fuck up. Are we on a good path right now? Great. Don't mess with it. Don't tinker it. Keep your hands off. That's responsibility.

Now, this is one of the ways we've essentially institutionalized at 37signals with our way of working, which is something we call Shape Up. It's a software development methodology. You can read about it at Basecamp.com/ShapeUp. Its central thesis is that we work in six-week cycles. At the beginning of a cycle, we'll determine what we should work on. Once we start working on that cycle, we will work on the things we said we were going to work on and then we will otherwise sit on our damn hands. All the good, great ideas we're going to come up with, they're not going to just flow into the work right away. They have to wait until it's time to decide again. That level of tying your hand behind your backs in some ways, not being able to react on every gut instinct of urgency when you get a new idea of you hear a new idea, is a way to fuse responsibility with a reservedness. That responsibility doesn't mean just being hyperactive all the time, that these things actually go hand-in-hand. The best thing, and I still struggle with this from time to time, the best thing you can do for your team that you're responsible for is to leave them the hell alone.