LEADERSHIP: OF MID-LEVEL AND FRONT-LINE TEAMS

Published: 2009-03-23   please add a comment below

Team leaders split their time between "leading" and "doing".  But daily pressures (particularly now) drag leaders towards the latter: getting things delivered, resolving technical challenges, responding to HO demands, and keeping the admin. flowing.  Too often, they stop leading; and, become managers at best or merely operatives at worst.  Sounds familiar?

In the current stormy times, it's happening everywhere.  As team leaders and their people struggle to keep their footing.  But if you, as a team leader, withdraw from leading, don't be surprised if your people feel abandoned and uncertain.

So, what's needed?  A rebalance towards "leading".  Helping your team members to become (once again) aligned, confident and engaged.  And, willing to take on the "doing".

Here are four steps to start:

1. Talk with each team member to discover their current concerns.  Both "hard" and "soft" ones: around market and technical issues and also people and cultural ones.
2. Identify a range of actions YOU CAN TAKE to address these.  Let me repeat: YOU CAN TAKE.  This is about leadership: your role, not defining tasks for others!
3. Select the highest leverage actions to go into your personal Leadership Action Plan.  And, for each action, define your commitments: the what, the when and with whom.
4. Start implementing.  As with any plan, implementation is all.  And, as you progress, continue to talk and adjust your plan to ensure you're up to date with people's concerns.

So, here's a quick quiz!  Today, what percent of your time is invested in leading - rather than hands-on delivery of business outputs?  What percent would your team like it to be?  And what are their priority concerns?  The achievability of current goals and performance metrics?  Or, whether staff can deliver after recent layoffs? Or, declining efficiency in the face of current turmoil?  Or, their individual responsibilities going forward?  Or, the need to rethink strategy completely?

It's understandable that many team leaders today put too much time into hands-on activity.  In a storm, it's all hands on deck.  However, the urgent easily drives out the important.  And, unless the captain leads, the crew may attend to the wrong priorities.  Or, different individuals take contradictory actions and capsize everything.  Leadership is always critical.

So, where's your plan?  Or, better still, how are you going to create one?

The V|E|C|T|O|R tool helps you think through your team's concerns, explore potential actions, and sift all this into a one-pager that focuses your leadership actions for the next stage of the storm!  It will take you an hour or so.  Is that too much for your team to expect?  After all, it could keep them and the ship afloat.  And, you in a job!

Dr. Timothy Pascoe AM
PhD (Cambridge), MBA (Harvard), BE & BEc (Adelaide)
Creator, V|E|C|T|O|R Leadership^®