A Key Team Leadership Quality: Give People Room to Work

Here is a rarely understood team leadership quality. At the detailed operational level you can earn trust and show respect to your people by not micro-managing their work. Allow your people to decide how they will accomplish their responsibilities. The best team leaders understand that there are many paths to any destination. They allow others to select their own path while still holding them accountable for reaching the destination.

But, an important factor in this team leadership quality is to not get too far away. Stay close and follow up with your people. Ask them how you can help them accomplish their objectives. It is common for leaders to get so busy that they are not available to help. Those who are best at team leadership can be relied on to respond thoughtfully and timely when people ask them for assistance or perspective.

Click here to search or article and newsletter archives for dozens more team leadership tips.

Management Training Tip - Remove Barriers to Performance

Every organization is filled with projects and processes. Left untended these always become cumbersome and convoluted. This wastes your and your staff’s time and hurts everyone’s morale.

Management training rarely addresses this. But, those with the most effective team leadership styles take accountability for removing the barriers that block effective performance. There are many facets to meeting this responsibility.

One of these critical leadership qualities is collaboration

Start by asking your people what they need to do their work effectively and efficiently. Listen closely. Ask questions to clarify your understanding. Also, seek out the perspectives of people from outside of your department. Your objective is to gain broad and deep perspective on the circumstances that affect the issue you are dealing with.

This simple act of collaboration is one of the key components of a highly effective leadership style. Click here to search or article and newsletter archives for dozens more team leadership tips.

Open Minds.... and the Right Questions

We often run across senior executives who think they alone know the answer to their organization's problems. They usually want help in masterminding an approach to team leadership that gets their lower level people to do just what they want. Sometimes they ask for the magic bullet of management training with the mistaken hope that it alone will create all the change they want. Well, we will have to confess we don't have a very successful record of helping these types of senior executives very much.

But thankfully we also run across another kind of senior executive. We find some with wide open minds. We find some whose leadership style emphasizes getting the best thinking out of the people that they lead. We find some who seek the answer from those closest to the problem and where the actual work really gets done. We find some who have become very skilled (or want to be) at asking the right questions in order to unlock the wisdom of the team.

Instead of just trying to show how smart they are or deciding every crucial issue, this second group of executives display leadership qualities that allow them to combine their own experience and knowledge with that of the people they lead.

Can you guess which group consistently gets a higher percentage of successful outcomes? Ask yourself today where you stand. Consider building your leadership style to include a wide open mind and asking the right questions.

Where Did The Time Go?

The leadership skill of managing your time and the time of your team is critical to success. I want to reveal to you one of the worst "black holes" that suck time away from you...meetings.

Meetings are the life's blood of a business, but only if they help move work forward. How many meetings do you waste time in? A lot I'll bet.

An excellent leadership skill to develop is determining which meetings are really worth your time and which one's you should avoid. Be discriminating with your time, it is valuable. Only spend it in meetings that add value to your results.

We wrote an article a while back about this critical leadership skill of time management. Click here to read more.

Do You Like Shiny Things?

A common mistake leaders make is to get distracted from executing their strategic priorities. Management training rarely, if ever, addresses this tendency, but avoiding it is a critical leadership skill.

Leaders too often get distracted from their current work by the next new, “shiny thing.” Just because it is new does not make it better to do than what you are already working on.

You are far better off seeing your current efforts all the way through to the end. The leadership quality of fully implementing your ideas is one of the keys to leadership success.

No One's Listening

We were thinking some more about the communication challenges that our survey respondents are asking us about. In our last blog we wrote about the need to tell the hard truth. What else do we think you need to know to really communicate well?

A phone call yesterday from one of our CEO clients sparked an idea. We had just completed a strategic planning process for an organization that he had recently acquired. One of the executives of that acquired company had said something to the CEO that he thought was important for us to hear.

He told us that the executive every year for 20 years he had participated in strategic planning, but had never been listened to. The plan was determined by two executives with only a perfunctory attempt at gaining perspectives from the rest of the executive team.

This executive told the CEO that for first time ever he really felt a part of the planning process. Because of that her felt real ownership of the plan and was excited about implementing it. But, what he said next is the most important point. Because he felt that he was truly listened to, he was much better able to listen to others instead of merely fighting for his point of view.

As questions, be open to different points of view. Do not push your point of view too hard. If you want to be listened to, start by listening to others.

Team Leadership and Communications

We have received hundreds of responses to our recent online survey asking people about their leadership challenges. If you have not already completed the survey please click here http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Wp9FUFQbA6G3MLxZacyKug_3d_3d and tell us about your challenges. Your input will help us develop products and services to help you.

One of the most common challenges leaders have shared with us is communicating effectively. As I reviewed the survey results and saw this concern expressed over and over again I was reminded of a situation that happened to me when I was a very young consultant.

I was working on my first merger integration. Two large healthcare organizations were coming together. I had just completed a series of focus groups with front line staff. One of their biggest concerns was that they believed that senior management was lying to them about whether there would be any layoffs as a result of the merger.

I am sitting in the Board Room with all of the senior executives. I told them about the staff's concern. The executives looked at each other, but no one said anything for several seconds. Then the Chief Operating Officer said something that stunned me; "Of course we're lying to them. If we told them the truth they would cause us all sorts of problems!"

What happened next stunned me even more. Nothing happened next. No one said a word. They just moved on to the next topic. No one cared that leadership was lying to the staff. There were layoffs, of course. Once they started the staff lost all trust for management. The best people began to leave the organization. Within three years the merged company was out of business.

The communication lesson here is to tell the truth even when it is hard. If you tell the truth even when it is painful to hear people will begin to trust you. When people trust you they will listen to you. If they listen to you they will follow your leadership.

Team leadership requires trust. Build it by telling the hard truth.