Leaders: You are Focusing on the Wrong Team!
I retain only one or two bits of wisdom from classes I attend, or books I read. One that has impacted my leadership comes from “The Five Disfunctions of a Team,” by Patrick Lencioni:
The team you lead is not your primary team.
Read that again.
Another way to say it, “The team you belong to must come ahead of the team you lead.”
Why it Matters
Success is built on trust and collaboration. Gone are the days of siloed strategy and leadership. To build trust and collaboration, leaders must shift their focus up and across from the team they lead, to the team of peers they belong to.
Of course, we must lead and manage our direct teams to create vision, shared goals, expectations, and measures of success, but we also must coach, mentor, and push decision making downward to empower our teams to create their own shared victories.
After all, your team of direct reports should be functioning as their own primary team.
Going Deeper
You may be wondering, “Isn’t it my job to lead my downstream teams?”
Well, yes, but it’s not your entire job.
It’s critical to lead your direct reports in the dimensions listed above, but it is the job of your direct reports to lead their direct reports, and so on. Otherwise, we may be bypassing their leadership, credibility, authority, and growth.
Leaders have five main focuses for the team they lead:
Lead and inspire their teams to achieve common goals with clarity
Provide resources--including face time, time with others, people or budget
Remove roadblocks to success
Prioritize work and tasks
Coach and develop direct reports
Anything else means you are working too much.
Of course, all of this is in an atmosphere of caring, compassion, and psychological safety.
How much of your current workday is spent involved in decisions, operations, planning (and drama) that is downstream from your direct reports? How can you start to identify that work, and reposition it to its rightful owner?
Leaders also are responsible for five main focuses for the team they belong to:
Build relationships with peers and other stakeholders
Lead and manage change across impacted peer teams
Communicate honestly and keep your peers informed
Ask for input and feedback—not only for yourself, but on behalf of your team members’ performance and growth
Manage Up the successes and progress of your peers’ teams
Of course, all of this is in an atmosphere of caring, compassion, and psychological safety. (Catch that connection?)
Being able to focus on these items with the team you belong to helps to engender trust, support effective strategy, reduce waste, and build what Captain Sully Sullenberger would refer to as the “Team of Teams” mindset.
How Can I Make the Shift?
In conversations with leaders, the main block to focusing on the team they belong to is time. No one comes to work intent on ignoring their primary team, but we can easily be caught up in the business of the team we lead. Here are some strategies to help:
1. Switch to curiosity and a coaching mindset when you find yourself in problem-solving or decision-making mode on behalf of the team you lead. (see April Leadership Hikes). Using a coaching mindset supports your direct team in identifying their own best solutions, supports ownership and accountability, and helps them grow. And it frees up your time and energy.
2. Review your calendar and decline meetings where you are no longer needed. Some questions to ask yourself are:
a. Is there someone else on the team better positioned to attend or own the meeting?
b. Are there multiple people attending from the team you lead; how can one person represent the voice of the team?
c. Are there multiple people attending from the team you belong to; who should really attend?
d. Do you need to be involved or simply informed?
3. Block time on your calendar to meet with your peers. Success with the two previous points, should yield some time; block that time to meet regularly with your peers. Successful collaboration depends on relationships. If possible, try to meet colleagues in person; even in a virtual world, relationships strengthen more quickly when people are together. Schedule one regular meeting where you don’t discuss work.
4. Ask for input and feedback from the team you belong to. When designing initiatives or making changes in your department, don’t do so in a vacuum. It is always true that multiple teams are impacted by any decision, getting input from your peers and other stakeholders is critical for success.
Leaders: Shift Your Focus
All of us want to ensure that we are leading our teams in a way that is engaging, caring, and supportive; but we can easily get caught up in the business of managing their business. This is not unusual; we have been recognized and rewarded for the strength of our decisions and our ability to get things done.
But as we step into leadership, our focus must shift. Focusing all our time on the team we lead can cause us to neglect the team most critical to success: the team we belong to.
Per Patrick Lencioni: “The team you belong to must come ahead of the team you lead.”
What steps are you willing to take to shift?