Teamership: Getting tactical
The impact of a team leader is directly related to their conversations. Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash
Conversations are the primary tactical approach for leaders. There is usually an opportunity for leaders to have better conversations within and beyond their team to support high performance.
The performance of a team leader can be traced back to their conversations. Rate your responses to these statements for yourself (or a leader) on a scale of 0 (strongly disagree) to 10 (very well) and you will be pretty close to getting a sense of how well things are going in terms of leading the team:
The leader has strong connections and meaningful conversations with each team member individually.
The leader has strong connections and meaningful conversations across the organisation.
The leader has strong connections and meaningful conversations beyond our organisation.
The leader facilitates conversations that allow for learning and insight.
The leader encourages and considers opinions that are different to their own.
This is an abridged list, but you get my point.
The impact of a team leader is directly related their conversations.
Most leaders, however, aren’t supported to have high quality conversations with their team members individually, with their team collectively and beyond their team. If you were to map the conversations that a leader has (assessing the type, frequency and quality of those conversations) from week to week or year to year, I’m willing to bet that….
Most leaders are having the same types of conversations with the same types of people in the same types of ways.
It is no wonder, then, that team performance typically doesn’t change very much.
It’s not the fault of individual leaders. Most leaders are working hard and being asked to do a lot with often less time, resources and people*. We need to make it easier for leaders to have access to better tactics (conversation frameworks) in their teams and easier for them to have those conversations.
If conversations are the primary tactical approach for leaders, here are a few questions to consider this week (for yourself or leaders that you support):
Are leaders having the right conversations with each team member?
Does the leader facilitate the team collectively having the right conversations?
How well are leaders supported to have high quality conversations with their team members individually, with their team collectively and beyond their team
*Probably a good time for a friendly reminder that people and resources are different things - and the best leaders have conversations with people like they are humans, not resources.