The Most Impactful Thing You Can do as a Leader!

From a team perspective, the primary service we can perform as leaders is to enable the success of our teams, to be servant leaders. To do that, we have to know what success looks like, ensure that the team has the tools and knowledge they need, that they are developing mastery and growing, and that we have created an environment conducive for them to motivate themselves.

There is a lot to unpack here!

Knowing what success looks like starts with our mission and vision, then working with each team member to negotiate their goals to support the mission. Once we do that, we can work with them to create measures. The goals should be stretch goals. They should cause the team to learn new skills or expand existing skills. Having a learning organization is central to keeping up with our ever-changing world. It’s also essential to consider the area(s) of mastery team members are developing so their goals align.

Now that we have a direction and goals, we can do a gap analysis to ensure that team members have the tools and mentoring they need and a learning plan. We are setting them up for success and fulfillment. Measures of success should be reviewed regularly. This may vary due to the complexity of the task or the goal date. A weekly check-in is a good idea. If we had waited to look at measures until near the end of the project, it could have veered off track. It’s also important to take an agile approach and adjust or even eliminate tasks as business needs change. If you have to change direction or end a task, make it a collaborative decision. Don’t make a pronouncement. More on that shortly.

Team members’ mastery is essential for an organization to stay relevant. The rate of change in society and technology is ever-increasing. If we think of an organization as an organism, we can’t just have some portion of the organization growing and learning. The whole team needs to participate. The whole organism needs to evolve. Not just the head or the feet.

Underpinning all of this creates an environment conducive for the team to motivate themselves. Extrinsic motivation, command, and control, or carrots and sticks, is an outdated and harmful practice for team members who do creative work. In the knowledge economy, that should be all of us. This leads us to intrinsic motivation, the engine of personal purpose and self-motivation, our “why.” Dan Pink, in his book Drive, says the team needs Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose for us to motivate ourselves. We need autonomy about the work we do, when we do it, and who we do it with, we need to be constantly challenged and growing toward a deeper mastery, and we need to be part of something bigger than ourselves. These things are necessary and not sufficient.
All of this is important because if our team does not feel safe, valued, and relevant, if they don’t trust their leaders or each other, their fight or flight reaction will be triggered, and their ability for creative thinking will be impaired. Any time this happens, it takes a lot of effort to build trust and feel safe again. Because of how our brains work, it’s much easier to make us feel unsafe or threatened than to do the opposite. This is one reason why trust and transparency are so important. We are less resistant when we feel safe, trust our leaders, and are involved in change. And we want our teams to embrace change, not actively resist it.

This is why servant leadership is so important. Leaders must build relationships with their direct reports, trust, and demonstrate care. They have to be dedicated to the well-being and success of each team member.

Being a servant leader is more like being a coach than a boss. And a well-cared-for team will walk over hot coals for such a leader!. Some of you are probably thinking, what about the shit work? That’s easy. We all do it, each of us takes a turn. We do it for the good of the team. When I was in IT leadership roles and a truck pulled up with equipment, I was the first one out the door to help unload, and with a smile on my face and a spring in my step.

Building these relationships with the team, understanding their passions, what motivates, them how they like to be recognized, and what they are good at is hard work, helping them create goals and measures is harder still. At our core, we all want to be of service, and this is the way leaders can be of the highest level of service. It’s the most important work we can do.