Leading people: your plan of action
So, you’re new to leading people and you’ve got your first team ready to go. Where do you start?
Your plan of action for leading—rather than managing—your team is short. There are three disciplines to focus on:
- Setting the tone
- Getting your head around the concept
- The hard way: giving a formal presentation on your values and expectations
- Know what your core values are and defend them
- Corrections done correctly
- Creating and nurturing teams
- The only trait of a team
- Structure of teams
- Everyone has a starring role
- Everyone’s gotta row
- Getting technology done: managing contractors and outside support
- Informing and infusing your vision
If you master these three approaches and focus on implementing them as “your job,” you’ll be on your way to leading rather than managing your creative team. Over the next several posts we’ll talk in detail about each of these, but for right now let’s have a brief introduction to the concepts.
I’ll use this post as sort of a series home page for all the posts over the next couple weeks as we cover these topics, so if you want to just create a bookmark for this page you can come back to it periodically for links to the subsequent posts in the series.
Setting the tone
One of the things that is your job, and that you should never shirk, is to set the tone. “Tone” is the general atmosphere that you create in your workplace or for your team.
Set the tone in your organization by telling everyone what you stand for, and what they can expect from you. If you are, or can become, comfortable doing it in a formal all-hands presentation, then do it that way. This will put you on record with a public commitment that you won’t soon break. As we explore this topic in future posts I’ll share with you what I did and the ways in which it did and didn’t work.
Once you’ve put you’re values out there you’ve got to defend them. The tone isn’t set by you simply stating your values and walking away. You’ve got to be prepared to put your energy and attention behind creating an environment that first protects, and then promotes, those things you said were important.
Creating and nurturing teams
Nothing is impossible if you are willing to give the credit for the accomplishment to others. There is a super goofy business expression that goes like:
TEAM: Together Everyone Achieves Miracles
I know: it makes me cringe to read it too (hey, I had to write it!). But it’s so lame that I’ve remembered ever since I heard it, and it’s the concept that really matters. Remember the expression if it helps you remember just how special it is to have a fully functioning team working together to get something done. Set them up and then get out of the way. And if you don’t want them to shoot you in the back, you might try NOT sharing the TEAM expression with them. Your call though.
We’ve already talked a lot about teams; this is another example of how the principles of leadership that we are talking about are all intertwined and support one another. But there are a few things to say about how you actually go about the business of starting and running teams. We’ll cover those in this series.
Informing and infusing your vision
Empowerment is about putting your team members in a position to make decisions for themselves without having to consult with the boss first. Your goal for your organization is to have the right decision made as quickly as possible. The least difficult way to accomplish this goal is to make those decisions as close as possible to the place in the organization that needs the answer.
But to be truly empowered people can’t feel like they can make just any decision, your team has to have the tools to make the right decision for the organization. A big part of getting to the right decision is understanding how you think about things; i.e., what factors do you consider, with what relative weights, in making a particular decision? To get this across, people need to understand your vision.
This involves first telling everyone the same story, probably multiple times (inform), and then sticking to it and making sure others adopt it as their own (infuse).
