Is leading a team complex or simple?
I propose that we have over complicated leadership.
Here is a simple recipe for leading a team inside an organisation.
Cooking up a High Performing Team – The Leadership Recipe
Ingredients: Ensure that your authorities match your accountabilities
Accountabilities
- Own personal effectiveness
- Employees output
- Building team capabilities
- Leading the team
- Change and continuous improvement
Authorities
- Spend resources
- Veto appointments to your team
- Assign tasks
- Recognise, reward and review work
- Initiate removal from role
Steps:
Step 1 – Fit the right people to the right role.
Ensure that each team member has the right knowledge, skills and experience (or provide them with these). Ensure that they value the work. This is an inmate capability and cannot be changed. Employees who do not value the work that they do are unable to perform to their best over time. Finally your employees must have the appropriate intellectual capability for the role. If they are too smart for their level in the organisation, they will get bored and annoy their boss. If they are not intellectually capable then they cannot ‘do the job’ and will micro-manage their staff.
Step 2 – Align the accountabilities of all members of your team.
Ensure that not only do they understand their own accountabilities but that they also understand the accountabilities of their peers and where the hand-offs occur. This alignment must be done as a group meeting together.
Step 3 – Solve problems with your team using the team-working process.
To ensure that your team performs to ‘greater than the sum of the parts’ your team must meet and follow a to-working process that includes: sharing context, clarity of purpose, identification of issues, understanding the needs of all parties, brainstorming options, evaluating options, deciding solutions (manager decides) followed by task assignment to implement the proposed solution (see next step).
Step 4 – Assigning tasks to direct reports.
Ensuring that any task that is assigned includes: context, purpose, quantity, quality, resources and timing. All tasks should be documented unless they are trivial.
Step 5 – Meet with your team and direct reports.
All managers should meet weekly with their team to check-in, identify issues, monitor projects and KPIs and solve problems. All managers should meet weekly with their direct reports on a one on one basis. The agenda should be similar to that of the team meetings but also include the opportunity to provide continuous feedback on their performance and solicit feedback on your own performance.
