Feb 06 2013

Team Leader Responsibilities

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Team Leader Responsibilities

You’re going to be leading a team and it suddenly hits you. How? What’s the secret to effective team leadership?

Here are some basic tips to help you get started right.

1. Make sure you have a clear mission and definite goals. Then make sure everyone on the team understands the mission and goals. For a more effective team, make sure each team member knows how they contribute and that you value that contribution.

2. Encourage, even demand full participation. It isn’t uncommon for teams to devolve into a few members who actually work. When each member knows what they are expected to contribute, it’s easier to keep them engaged throughout the project.

3. Insist on open communication. That isn’t to say you can’t allow subgroups within your team. Just make sure they keep everyone informed about what they’re doing. This is an especially important point for virtual or distance teams where there is little or no face-to-face contact.

4. Keep your boss informed on what the team is doing. Occasionally provide an update to keep the boss up to speed, and happy, and also allow him or her to make minor course corrections if necessary. That will prevent discovering that you needed to approach the mission differently at the end of the project.

5. Most importantly, always remember that the team’s purpose is not to further your career. It’s interesting that understanding this point will be much more likely to advance your career than specifically using the team to advance your career.

One more thing. Have fun! And make it fun for your team too.

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Feb 04 2013

Leadership and Talent Management

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Leadership and Talent Management

Take a look at this article from Chief Executive.net. The author is speaking about talent management and identifies the top ten concerns for 2013. Leadership development is on that list, but note that the other nine are really leadership issues also.

Four Steps to Better Talent Management

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Jan 04 2013

Ups, Downs, and Moving Forward

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Ups, Downs, and Moving Forward

 

I’m honored that Darren Johnson has published my article titled Ups, Downs, and Moving Forward. Please take a moment to read it at Letting Go Cafe.

 

While you’re there, take a look at the other articles on Darren’s site. He has a great message!

 

Have a terrific New Year!

Bob

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Dec 11 2012

Leading with Standards and Expectations

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Leading with Standards and Expectations

“Jerry doesn’t do much work does he?”

“No he doesn’t. I hope that will change with the new management.”

“Yea, they’re probably going to fire him.”

Actually, they probably aren’t. At least not for a while. You see, Jerry has been flaunting the standards for a long time now with no consequences. If management terminates him at this point, they will be open for a possible lawsuit. Here’s what management will need to do.

First, make sure there are two very clear documents available for each employee. The first is the job description. I’m not talking about the normal vague nonsense written in unintelligible legalize. The job description needs to be specific. If the job description is written by a distant HR person feel free to add your own specific expectations.

The second document is the employee handbook. Again, this may be written in some unseen part of the company. Become familiar with it and if it’s vague, feel free to supplement it with your own expectations as well.

Make sure each employee has read and understands both documents. It’s a good idea to have them sign a statement to that effect.

Now that these documents are in place, management can get rid of Jerry, right?

Not so fast. Jerry, and probably other employees, has established a pattern of behavior and the previous management has accepted that behavior by not taking any action. So, the new management is going to have to start over. They will need to take a progressive series of actions to enforce the standards they’ve set for all employees. This will take a little time, but it’s worth it to improve the company.

The moral here is that a company’s leadership must set standards and enforce them consistently and fairly. That’s a basic tenant of leadership. Set good standards and expectations, make sure all employees understand them, and make sure they know you will enforce them fairly and equitably.

 

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Nov 29 2012

Growing Leaders, A Cautionary Tale

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Growing Leaders, A Cautionary Tale

We had a great lineup. Each branch of the organization had a leader who was hand-picked by the boss and was doing a good job. Overall, the organization was enjoying much success. But there was a problem. The boss liked the organization the way it was and was not interested in moving people on to bigger responsibilities in the larger company or moving people up within the organization. In fact, if you were offered the opportunity to move to another part of the company, it meant the boss didn’t like you.

This is the situation I found upon joining the organization. I was responsible for operations; essentially the deputy. I was there only because the boss hadn’t liked my predecessor very well and so had helped him move on. It seemed to me we had become stagnant. We were successful at the time, but could not sustain that success unless we grew new leaders.

Whenever I suggested a move, the boss said no, everything was fine the way it was. But it wasn’t. I saw several high potential leaders who had no opportunity to grow. There were also leaders who needed to move beyond our organization to bigger responsibilities within the larger company.

Eventually, the boss was rewarded with what he hadn’t made available to his subordinates and moved on to bigger and better things. A new boss arrived and immediately saw what was happening. He began managing the careers of the organization’s leaders and asked me who we should consider for advancement. He carefully considered my recommendations and together we helped more junior leaders become successful than in any other organization I’ve been a part of.

It’s important to recognize potential new leaders; senior leaders should be actively seeking them out. But, it’s just as important to ensure they have opportunities to develop leadership knowledge and skill.

Having a great team in place is good. Loving a successful status quo is understandable. But, expecting current success to last forever, without growing new leaders, is the road to disaster.

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Nov 15 2012

Leadership and Vision: Employees Helping the Business Grow

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Leadership and Vision: Employees Helping the Business Grow

Leadership is my area of expertise. Marketing is not. I enjoy helping leaders grow. I don’t enjoy marketing much so I belong to a marketing group that helps me understand the ins and outs of marketing my business. This week I heard a comment that I’ve found to be a common refrain: employees don’t care about marketing. This comment always comes during a discussion of employee’s lack of interest in growing the business. It doesn’t have to be that way!

Employees care about their paychecks. That’s absolutely true; they have to live. It’s also true that most employees don’t have the same entrepreneurial spirit as many business owners. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t care about growing the business.

In fact, when employees understand why the business exists, what it does, and how it does that, they have taken the first step to helping the business grow. When employees understand how they fit in that equation and why they are important to the business’ success, they’ll begin to be part of that success.

People have a need to be part of something. That doesn’t just mean they show up to the same place five days a week, but that they are a real contributing, important part. Too often, the workplace doesn’t provide that sense of belonging, instead treating employees as just another cog in the gears of production. If that’s how you see your workers, how can you possibly expect them to do anything but the minimum requirements?

A business leader should have a vision for the company, that inspiring view of where the business is going or what it can do. People tend to want to follow others who have such a vision, but many leaders see employees following their vision just to ride the coattails of success.

There’s a better approach. When business leaders make their employees part of realizing that vision great things can happen. It isn’t hard, but it does require a little effort on the leader’s part. Employees must first understand the leader’s vision, then clearly see themselves as a key part of the drive toward that vision. They must know how they can help make the vision a reality.

Just as important, leaders must treat employees as a valuable part of the success equation and not a liability. Then, and only then, will employees care about the growth of the business.

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Nov 08 2012

Developing Energized Team Leaders

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Developing Energized Team Leaders

I was recently speaking to a leader who was wondering how to help team leaders learn to lead teams of their peers.

Leading peers is a daunting task for any leader but is even more difficult for someone who has no leadership experience or training. His question sent me back more than 30 years to memories of my first leadership experience.

It was Air Force basic training. Shortly into that experience, I was selected as a squad leader for a group of 10 other young men who were in the exact same position as I, except I was responsible for their actions too. Though I should probably apologize to those guys, we all made it through that ordeal.

Leading peers is difficult and it’s often a first leadership experience. I suggest three ways to make that experience more positive.

First, consider the assignment’s goal. If the team is transient, only chartered for a short period of time and focused on a specific task, consider assigning a team lead who is on your radar as a potential supervisor or manager. The team position provides an excellent opportunity to observe how they handle themselves. Remember though, he or she isn’t an experienced leader and they’re going to make mistakes. They will most likely need a little help and guidance along the way.

Second, provide the new leader with some basic leadership training. That training must include the transition from peer to leader because this is one of the hardest adjustments for new leaders to make. Training should also include fundamentals of communication, leadership styles, and especially what is and isn’t motivation

Third, treat him or her as a leader. As a squad leader, I didn’t really have a lot of authority, but when the sergeants called me in and shut the door, they made it clear to the rest of my team who they were holding responsible. The evidence often reverberated through the walls. While I don’t suggest your discussions should be heard through the walls, you do need to be aware that your actions will have a lot to do with how the leader is perceived by the team and will go a long way toward helping them make the transition from peer to leader.

That first leadership experience set me on a course that has given me many opportunities. With training and your support, the same can be true for your new team leaders.

 

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Oct 24 2012

Change: The One Thing That Makes it Easier

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Change: The One Thing That Makes it Easier

Joe and Jane were both managers in a large company and supervised divisions roughly equal in size and responsibility. The company had recently implemented several changes that were disruptive to both divisions. Joe was having a lot of trouble getting them implemented. His workers were openly rebellious and many were filing complaints and grievances.

Jane’s division was also unhappy with the changes but were not openly rebellious and actually accepted them, striving to implement them as best they could.

To understand why the stark difference between Joe’s and Jane’s divisions, let’s turn back the clock.

Joe is the type of leader who knows he’s in charge and if you work for him, you better know that too. He prides himself on listening to his workers, but in reality he’s only hearing them agree with him. He doesn’t bother to ask anyone else their thoughts before he makes decisions; after all, he’s the leader. He’s found it convenient to tell the workers whatever he thought would keep them quiet, even if it means stretching the truth.

Jane’s leadership style is quite different. She regularly gets out of her office and talks to her workers, making a genuine, and obvious effort to understand their concerns. She keeps them informed as much as she can and tells them when she isn’t able to answer their questions.

When the changes were announced at a staff meeting both Joe and Jane knew they would not be popular. Jane asked the plant manager, Greg, if she could speak with him for a few minutes after the meeting. Joe just rolled his eyes and said, “There she goes again. Why can’t you just do what you’re told?” Jane ignored him and privately expressed some concerns to Greg who quickly understood she had some valid points. Greg took her concerns to the company’s president who also understood and made some modifications.

Word got back to the workers in both divisions (as it always does). Jane’s division saw that she had represented their concerns and, while they weren’t happy with the changes, they knew that she would need their support if she was to continue representing them so well.

Joe’s division also realized that Jane had made the changes easier to accept, but were upset that Joe had not supported her, and them, so they didn’t see any reason to support him. They rebelled and many even refused to implement the changes.

Change isn’t always popular and it’s sometimes difficult to implement. There are lots of theories about change and how humans respond to it. A good leader will study change and understand the stages of acceptance, how and why people react, and all the other nuances of this complex subject. But there’s a basic factor that quite often can make the difference between acceptance and rebellion.

Trust.

When workers trust their leaders, change is much easier.

Let me know what you think. Post a comment.

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Oct 10 2012

Real Leadership and Real Leaders

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Real Leadership and Real Leaders

In a recent on-line discussion, a fellow leadership trainer and consultant made a stunning comment. He opined that positions like CEO and COO are the only real leadership positions in an organization. Of course, that’s as wrong as it can be, but unfortunately it isn’t a unique opinion and comes from a misunderstanding of leadership and how it applies at different levels.

There are plenty of definitions of leadership; take your pick, but they all boil down to the basic function of causing other people to do what the leader wishes them to do. Where you are on your organization’s food chain will refine that definition. Let’s look at several different levels.

Those with titles such as supervisor, team chief, or foreman have a very hands-on level of leadership. They don’t make corporate policy or plan strategy at the executive level, but that doesn’t mean they don’t lead. They do. In fact, these are the leaders who have the most day-to-day, face-to-face contact with the workers who actually accomplish the organization’s mission. If you have issues like worker engagement, labor problems, or low productivity it’s likely you haven’t developed good leaders at this level.

People with titles that contain the word manager are probably at the middle leadership level. They have the often unenviable task of translating executive leadership demands to lower level leaders and transmitting lower level problems upward. This level also has the critical task of training, mentoring, and developing the leaders below them. That means, if you promote lower level leaders to these positions and didn’t train them in the fundamentals of leadership, you now have middle level leaders who don’t get it either; compounding the problems I mentioned.

Executive leaders practice a very different type of leadership. They set the pace, set company-wide goals, establish values and culture, and make the big decisions. These are higher level and critical leadership responsibilities but notice they don’t require much personal interaction with the people doing the work. In fact, and some experts get upset when I say this, the most senior executive levels have as much management as leadership responsibility.

Are executives the only real leaders in your organization? If you think so, then you most likely have a problem.

Do you agree or disagree? I’d like to know what you think. Please leave a comment.

 

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Oct 04 2012

Finding Rockstars

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Finding Rockstars

I read a lot about getting “rock star” people on the team. Jim Collins talks about getting the right people on the bus. There is lots of advice available concerning how to hire the “right” people. That’s great. I’m all for building the best team possible, but is selecting the team the only way to do that?

My military experience provides an interesting alternative view. Military leaders seldom if ever have the opportunity to select their own team. Instead, leaders are assigned to an already existing team, its members almost always assigned there by a system that takes little notice of individual strengths and weaknesses, placing them based on complex algorithms that only a computer could love. Those of us who led those teams took what we got.

A recipe for disaster right? Or at least mediocrity. Yet, those teams repeatedly exceeded expectations, doing difficult jobs under often very trying conditions. How can that be?

Those teams, so seemingly random, are imbued with core training that makes them not quite as random as they might appear.

Everyone has the same basic understanding of mission and they understand, they are part of something important and bigger than them as individuals..

There are well defined levels of leadership within the organization and each level receives training that is standardized throughout the service. Leadership development starts early and is continuous.

But there’s another important factor that makes teams successful, even if the leader wasn’t able to hand-select the members – allowing current members to become stars. Rather than trying to recruit stars, which military leaders generally can’t do, they make the people they have into stars.

You can too. I bet, in your organization, right now you have at least two or three people who have the potential to be stars. What are you doing to encourage them and help them become more than they are today? Do you spend all your time looking out for new hires that appear to be stars or are you building your own?

Don’t get so busy looking outside your organization for new talent that you miss the developing talent that is right under your nose.

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