It is amazing how many business leaders or team managers talk about their teams' failures without reflecting on the possibility that their failures are in fact more of a reflection on them than the team or teams they are leading. In fact, if there is a culture of team failure, and they have worked their way through a number of team compositions then they are most likely one of the few common denominators in the situation.
When I talk about team compositions, you must recognise that any significant change to a team changes that teams composition and the dynamics. That includes, for example;
These factors can reset the stages of team or group development as described by Tuckman.
So if you're ready to reflect on your own leadership and team management now, here are a handful of factors to consider!
This sounds like an obvious thing to say, but from my experience, many leaders expect a high level of "common sense" - but as you have probably heard before; common sense, is unfortunately not particularly common.
I am in no way suggesting you outline every possible scenario or situation, you need to have trust your teams talent, experience and knowledge while having a level of assertiveness to ask questions when it is needed, however, you need to ensure that they understand various aspects of your organisation and the task they are performing.
Organisational values provide your team(s) a baseline and focus on making the appropriate decisions in scenarios that they find themselves in.
Policies and procedures give your team a framework from which to work from and refer to at times when organisational values are not enough.
Further, you should put emphasis on self-documentation of common scenarios and processes so that there is consistency across your organisation and team members.
Getting into the specifics of the task details, such as understanding stakeholders, timeline expectations, expected quality, challenges and risks are important. Often, however, the most critical aspect often neglected is context. What does this task, you are asking them to deliver, affect your customers and your business?
The first two are relatively self-explanatory but task detail is one aspect I would like to talk about in more detail, especially the context.
If your team understands the importance of their work in relation to your customers and your business, they are more likely to make better decisions. This context that I speak of could and should include answering the below questions for your team members;
A team member who has been provided with the above information is going to; have the appropriate mindset and values to make effective, appropriate decisions, and the context for why this task is important and what it means to all stakeholders for it to be delivered on time, on budget and to expected standards and quality. That is a great start to set your team member up for success.
A simple to understand example of this is where delivery of work that will add a monthly amount of revenue to your organisation. Delays in delivery not only has an affect on revenue and cashflow, but there is an opportunity loss, where your resources could have been working on other paid work.
Tools can be considered a broad definition within the context of setting your team up for success. The above-mentioned values and knowledge could be considered the first "tools" for your team members. However, we should expand on this to include a number of other "tools" including;
Again, I am not suggesting and micro-management or hand-holding here, but you as a leader should be on the lookout for both internal and external factors that may be impacting your team members and either be actively shielding them from them or resetting your expectations based on these unexpected influences.
A great example of this within the context of a software development team is when there is an active project ongoing and there is a critical issue that pulls resources off the project temporarily. You, as their leader, need to understand that this impact will affect delivery. If you can deflect those interruptions to other resources without impacting the customers' experience then you absolutely should do so. If that is not an option, why not take the initiative to communicate your understanding that this interruption may impact on the project.
If you haven't already introduced effective feedback loops into your teams, you should absolutely do this. This is a great way to express your support and encourages you to implement changes to your teams work life, many of which cost little and have huge impacts on job satisfaction and productivity!
Ask them regularly how they are going (I prefer to do this via monthly coffee chats) and ask if there is anything that they need your help with whether it be related to the expectations and tools we mentioned above, or anything else.
Take this opportunity to also restate or set additional expectations for your group and team members, so that they are always clear and fresh for everybody involved.
Let me know what you think below in the comments!
