Leading with patience

Over the course of my career, I have been blessed with being given different teams to lead. I started with managing more than leading and it took me about ten years to realize the difference. Managers typically make sure that the work assigned to the team is done. Leaders, well, what do they do?  Leading is not all about barking orders and telling people what to do. In fact, doing so really is detrimental to the team’s productivity. Instead the leader should do whatever they can to get the team to get to their goal as effectively as possible. Here’s how I’ve accomplished this.

• Let the team own the goal by coming up with it themselves.
• Ask questions to see what the team comes up with as answers. Say “Do you think we could take on twice the business that we currently have?” Instead of saying, “Everybody needs to be twice as productive.”
• Listen to what the team has to say. Many good ideas should come out of the conversation, don’t pick or focus on one, just let them come up with ideas. One idea may get a bunch more going.
• Help them to choose. Voting is okay. Come up with two or three candidates and start a debate.
• Then ask “why?” Get the team to defend their goal by asking why they think it is a good one. The goal should be SMART, but don’t let the goal be dictated by having a measurement defined beforehand. I tend to focus more on the Attainability and Realistic parts at this point.
• Let the team make mistakes
• Sometimes the temptation is to take over or say “I need to do x.”  While that may help with the particular deadline or completion of a task, it doesn’t help the team to grow. In fact, this type of action will stifle your team. 
• Say, “What do you think?” This is a great way to turn the question around. You may know the answer off the top of your head, but the team member may need a little bit more time. And they may even come up with a better answer.  “What answer are you looking for?” is a great way to get out of a situation when the person is reluctant to give what they think is a bad answer.
• Give permission to fail. I don’t know about you, but when I screw something up I usually know why. Give your team permission to fail as long as they go into a situation with a goal and plan in mind. 
• Force improvement. Running retrospectives is a great tool for this. Many managers will do a “Root Cause Analysis” looking for one reason why the task went wrong. This puts everyone on the defensive and is hugely counter-productive since what you get is a bunch of CYA data that the team has wasted their time on creating. Instead, run a retrospective – what did we do right, where could we improve. Don’t just do this when something goes wrong, do it when things go right and do it on a regular basis. 
• Be positive. People improve and react better to mistakes when the conversation is “Well, what can we learn from what happened?” Rather than, “We need to find out what happened and make sure that it does not happen again!”

Those are my ideas and maybe even secrets to success. I wonder what your secrets are.