Tag: team work

Balancing act

FabrizioLeave a comment

There are two key challenges to the work of leaders. Two extremes you’ll constantly have to struggle balancing.

On one side, you have the difficult task of letting go, delegating, leaving space to others. On the other, you have the need to maintain a level of involvement and commitment, showing you care and you are actively thinking on how to empower others to drive things forward.

It is a common misunderstanding of those promoting hands-off leadership that leaders should be quiet and almost invisible. If that’s the case, the next question they’d have to answer would be: “do you even care?”.

Everything you say you’ll do

FabrizioLeave a comment

There are not many things you are asked to do when you lead other people.

Certainly, making sure your team has the needed support. Financial, political, and technical support. Also, truly listening to and caring for your team members, including helping them find a career trajectory they are comfortable with. Finally, taking difficult decisions when things stall or risk to stall, possibly with the aid of a transparent and candid process everyone in the team understands and trusts.

And then, of course, there’s everything you say you’ll do. This is as important as the three points above, as it sets the tone for the type of relationship you are going to build with your people. If you start not delivering on things you yourself have taken ownership for, even worst if you are not open and don’t explain when that happens, why that happened, then the relationship is going to be weak and feeble. And it will be very difficult to turn that around.

Good thing is, you choose what you promise. Choose mindfully.

Walk the walk

FabrizioLeave a comment

It’s tough demanding somebody to do something you are not doing yourself in the first place.

Try ask your kids to spend less time in front of the screen when that’s all you do as soon as you have a moment of free time. You can play the “I’m-the-adult” card for a while, and yet in the long run your request loses significance.

The same thing is valid in organizations. You might ask your team to be innovative and come up with new ideas, and you can still hide behind the urgency and contingency of the moment to always opt for the safe path. Yet eventually you’ll lose the commitment and they’ll bring their creativity elsewhere.

It’s as easy as that.

Leading juniors

FabrizioLeave a comment

When you hire somebody junior in your team, there are few things you need to make sure of in order to have this person develop, perform and be more than a cheap source of labor.

Allocate time to support them. In small teams, this can be complicated, and yet a junior member is most likely not going to learn and develop independently, and surely that is not going to happen in a way that can be beneficial to the company. Give them the appropriate attention, guide them, if necessary match them with a mentor, or an advisor, somebody you trust and is committed to what you are trying to achieve. Invest in their learning (online courses are great, peer group even better), and be absolutely sure they are not feeling on their own on a difficult journey.

Set some boundaries to their responsibilities. And make sure what’s in the job description is achievable with the support mentioned above. It’s funny to see how many students or new graduates are made “managers”, or “specialists”, setting them up for failure already in the way they are presented. It’s ok to be a “junior”, or a “coordinator”, or a “responsible” for a while, and then grow the list of responsibilities as more confidence is acquired.

Understand the way you behave will shape theirs. Contrary to more experienced people, who might have their own style, their own work routines, their own rhythm, junior employees usually don’t have any of that. You have the chance to help form such things, and you better do it consciously and with a clear plan. Think about the type of person you’d like to have in your team five years down the road, the type of colleague you’d be glad to work with, and then be mindful about how you measure their performace, how you talk to them, deliver feedback, give them guidance.

Offer problems

FabrizioLeave a comment

When leading people, it’s better to be careful about pushing urgencies down the line.

An urgency is always something personal. Something that is urgent for you is rarely urgent for another person, and when you leverage your position of power to get that done, two things happen.

First, the machine gets stuck. The member of your team who is working on your urgency is not being employed for what they were (hopefully) hired for. Instead, they are acting on orders. Value is not added and the organisation has just seen a bottleneck blooming.

Second, energies are drained. The effort put into doing a task one does not understand is more than the one put into a task one owns. Additional mental energy is needed to make sense of the situation, reverse-engineer the decision and figure out if this is the right time to search for a new job.

Rather than urgencies to act upon, offer people problems to solve, and let them come up with their list of actions, people to meet and documents to draft. Give them the tools and let them come up with their story. After all, nobody wants to be a secondary character in a story someone else has drafted.

Be the person who gives energy, not the one who takes it away.

From The Trillion Dollar Coach