Becoming a better team leader
First of all, let’s clarify the terms. A “team” is people, individual people with their own frustrations, gifts, passions, and problems. When you lead a team, you are dealing with individual people, not some amorphous entity.
This is why you don’t lead with memos, emails, and blog posts. You must deal in the messy reality of individual people. Anyone aspiring to leadership must come to grips with that truth.
To begin with, you have to care. In their well researched book on military leadership, Five Star Leadership, Patrick Townsend and Joan Gephardt interview a hardened marine corp gunnery sergeant about what he felt was the most necessary ingredient for being a good leader. His answer was surprising- you have to love the people under you. Hardly the answer you’d expect, but nonetheless, exactly correct. You have to care.
Jim Collins is famous for comparing a business to a bus. At first, one might think that the role of the leader is to drive the bus, but Collins says no; the role of the leader is to put the right people in the right seats on the bus. Who is in what seat will determine where the bus goes.
The late Zig Ziglar said that you don’t build a business, you build people. Then the people build the business.
But how do you do that?
The first thing, as mentioned, is to care about the people you lead. Don’t skip this step. For many aspiring leaders, it’s the hardest one. Tim Cummins, a Christian leader here in Atlanta, said one of the mistakes young pastors make, is trying to build and grow a church from a computer. It doesn’t work for them, and it won’t for you in your business. You have to care about people, and that starts by engaging them. Anyone that thinks this is easy has never done it.
Learn to trust. Jim Belasko and Ralph Stayer wrote a great book some years ago- Flight of the Buffalo. They discuss a hunting technique used by buffalo hunters to simply shoot the dominant bull first. The rest of the herd would then mill aimlessly around, and they could pick them off one by one.
The question this generates is: what is your team doing when you aren’t there? Milling aimlessly around? In many cases the answer is yes, and here’s why. You’ve taught them to do it.
When we make it clear that we don’t trust the people we lead, when we make it clear that mistakes are not tolerated, when we, in effect, punish creativity and energy, we will get lethargic, unmotivated team members.
Townsend and Gephardt talk about a class at a British military academy where after a leadership lecture, the instructor was asked: “Sir, what do you do if you are assigned to a crummy company?” To which he replied, “if you have a crummy company, then you are a crummy leader.”
If you have a terrible team, then you are a terrible leader, period. While that may sound harsh, in fact, it’s empowering. IF I am the problem, then I am the solution. That mindset allows much clearer thinking and corrective actions, then blaming everyone else.
Get the right people in the right seats. Encourage, encourage, encourage. Don’t concentrate on failures, concentrate on solutions and successes. People will make mistakes, and by the way, so do you!
Another great Zig Ziglar quote is that we judge others by their actions, but ourselves by our intentions. Stop finding errors, and instead find opportunities.
No One ever arrives at being a great leader; it’s a journey. So get started.