How are we Leading our Teams?

Today I want to address the human aspect of management.  Let’s face it, as leaders, we rise and fall based on the success of the team members that we manage.  

The best lesson I’ve ever learned in my years as a manager: ensure that the individuals within your team are recognized for the successes that they have and take responsibility when things go wrong.

Now that doesn’t mean that team members are not held accountable - but that they need breathing room to occasionally make mistakes and to learn from those mistakes.  The trick is knowing when to give them room to fail - it can’t be a project or task that is critical.  You need to find instances where a mistake won’t cause irreparable harm to the company or to your customers.

I’m not saying that I’m anywhere close to being an expert at this, but I do try and keep several things in mind as I “manage” team members within the organization.

1. Working together, have I been able to determine the strengths of the individual?  Am I giving them assignments that play to their strengths?
2. Have I set clear expectations of what the end result is for the task/project that they have been assigned?
3. When they hit a roadblock, do I listen to the individual and allow them an opportunity to define a path forward?
4. Am I spending enough time with the individual?  Do they have time with me to explore questions that they may have?
5. When they do fail - do I back them up?  Do I help them clean up the mess and move forward?

I’ll tackle the last point first - as a team, we all need to know that failure is ok.  Seriously, technology is changing every day.  We are expecting our team members to stay on top of the new features, products, languages, hardware and to have the answers.  Many of us are learning as we go.  Yes, we occasionally are heading out to seminars, or Googling for answers, but, the reality is that in many instances we are learning technology as we are building solutions to integrate into the enterprise.  Failure is going to happen.  You can somewhat mitigate the opportunity for failure by giving people stretch experience on non-critical projects/tasks, but you ultimately will end up having a failure.

So, it’s not if your team member will have a failure somewhere along the path, but when he/she will have a failure.  Your job as a leader is to mitigate the risk of failure by identifying the right times and places for individuals to be put in positions where they can fail.  And the team needs to understand that everyone is going to fail at some point.  But, failing on the same type of issue twice is not acceptable.  As an individual, we need to accept the risk of failure, acknowledge that it is ok, but take responsibility to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.  In fact, I recently read an article about an organization where the team members all took responsibility to help clean up the mess any time someone failed - the first time!  After that, if an individual team member failed again doing the same/similar task, they were held accountable to clean up the mess on their own - no help from the team.  This is not something that I personally have implemented, but I like the concept and may take a look at working it in to the overall way that my teams operate.

Let’s hop back to the first point from the list.  Knowing the strengths of the individual team members.  I’m not a fan of managing people to their weaknesses.  It is stressful for the individual and usually means that they are operating in a manner which promotes errors.  I’m much more focused on finding talent and focusing the hiring process around the needs that I have and how to find people with the characteristics, knowledge, experience and ability to successfully perform the role - hire for the individuals strengths and then amplify those strengths within the projects/activities/tasks that they are assigned.  It also means balancing these strengths across a team.  Sometimes for specific roles you can look for the same strengths, but more often than not, you actually want to find people with different strengths to form a team.

I’m not making the claim that individual can’t learn - they can, otherwise we, as a species, would never have learned how to leave the forest and build the culture of humanity.  That said, it is more reasonable to assume that an individual learn to hone their natural skills, knowledge and talents.  It is also reasonable to assume that attempting to stretch a person to become comfortable with areas where they show no predisposition to success will be a challenge.  Yes, they may learn the fundamentals, but they will most likely never really be comfortable within skills, knowledge and talents that they were forced to learn.  They may figure out how to compensate for the weakness, but along the way, they will most likely encounter serious resistance from within.

My second point - setting clear goals.  Too often, as leaders, we forget to clearly communicate the end goal.  This leads to a big gray area that promotes miscommunication within the team, lack of focus by individual team members and exponentially increases the risk to the organization by promoting a project that will go over budget and not deliver to the real needs of the user community.  It is important to define the end results - people need an understanding of what it is you are looking for, how you will claim success.  

I once had a manager that showed me a pyramid with 4 layers and had me measure the goals against these layers.  The layers were as follows:

1. Base layer - the bottom of the pyramid.  The customer.
2. 2nd layer up from the bottom of the pyramid.  The owners.
3. 3rd layer up from the bottom of the pyramid: The company.
4. 4th layer up from the bottom - the tip of the pyramid: The individual team member.

With every project, I was asked to identify the goals/outcomes for the project and prove that each individual goal/outcome satisfied each of the above groups.  Note - the last group satisfied is the individual team member.

My third point - opening my ears instead of my mouth.  Look, everyone is going to hit a roadblock.  It is human nature.  Not everything goes right, all of the time.  Someone has a bad day and forgets to do ‘x’, then ‘y’ fails and you end up having a bad day.  Sometimes, through no fault of their own, something shifts - an external vendor can’t deliver on time, a piece of hardware that was working yesterday has just failed, one of the key resources on the project was just admitted to the hospital and won’t be back for over a month - and they are left holding the bag.  When this happens, they are going to want to come in, sit down and tell you about it.  Your first instinct is going to be to jump to the answer, when in fact it should be to let the person wind their way through to a solution.  

Amazingly enough, most people will find the solution as they walk you through the problem that they are having.  If not, this is a mentoring opportunity.  Don’t tell them the answer, let them talk, ask them questions, give them hints, but make them find a solution.  It may not be your solution, it may not be the best solution, but if it gets the job done, it doesn’t damage the customer or put the company at risk, it isn’t illegal or immoral, let it happen.  It can be cleaned up later.  What you are really doing is showing the individual that you have confidence in their ability to find a solution.

And finally, the fourth bullet point - am I spending quality time with my individual team members?  Part of the contract, when you assume the mantle of leadership is to act as a mentor.  Everyone of the folks that you lead has their own personal goals.  What are you doing to help those individuals achieve the things that are important in their lives?  You need to find time on your calendar for everyone of your team members to be able to talk with you about their personal growth.  This means understanding what drives them, what they feel their natural skills/talents are, how to motivate them, and how to challenge them to hone their skills and talents.  It means finding a way to expose their professional passion and letting it grow.  Yes, their needs to be a common thread that ties the individual growth to the needs of the customer, the organization and the team.  Your job is to find the thread!

What are you doing to show your team members that you understand what drives them and that you are helping them to achieve their goals?

Tags: #SDLC #softwaredevelopment #lifecycle  #applicationdevelopment #leader

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