How to LEAD - #2
The LEAD Method
The LEAD Method is a combination of good practices that ensure the team is performing at the highest level for a long period of time. This method is focused on Team Leadership and I designed it to improve as much as possible the long term value that the team leader can have on the team.
As you’ve read above, LEAD stands for:
Learn: Know your team, understand each individual’s personality, why are they doing what they’re doing, what is their background.
Engage: Establish a team relationship, check their knowledge level, help whenever necessary, clarify how their tracking is done.
Analyse: Analyse results, check performance and productivity, receive and analyse feedback.
Develop: Coaching, goal setting, professional and personal development, career planning.
It is important to understand that there is not a specific order to use this method. In fact, to ensure you have a healthy and functioning team, all the topics should be working at the same time. I’ve written them by the order that feels more intuitive to start.
Learn
Imagine yourself building a flat with a crane. How would you feel like if you had no idea what each button and handle does? Quite a terrifying sight right? So that is how you should approach a team that you’re leading. You need to know who you’re leading to make the team able to work at the highest level.
How do I start an efficient learning process?
There are many ways to create a learning process from scratch: each person has its own way and prefers a certain approach to others. I suggest you the following:
Establish an efficient communication system with a professional channel and another one for personal/story sharing as well. Make sure that everyone knows how to separate both channels (tools like Slack, HipChat, and alike).
Have weekly meetings and monthly team buildings
At the end of each meeting, have a member of the team share a non work-related topic in 5minues. Make sure that all members speak before repeating, creating a rotational system. This will help you figure out what insterests each person and it makes everyone comfortable to share their ideas and feedback.
Create a Feedback & Ideas form.
Learning as a continuous process
It is fundamental to keep knowing each other while you’re working together, since that in a week or two you won’t know them as well as you will in two months. To make sure that this happens, you need to create a functional continuous process of learning:
Have regular individual meetings where you create a private comfortable place for each member to share his experience and feedback
Have monthly team buildings with the purpose of creating a non work related fun activity to strengthen the bonds in the team
Support side projects that members create (just make sure they aren’t having a negative effect on their performance)
When you’re creating a new product, service or process gather your team for a brainstorming session: this not only adds value to your work but also makes them feel engaged and appreciated
Individual meetings
After the first meeting, you probably still don’t know much about each individual in your team. It is nice to schedule an individual meeting with each member so you know more info about them like: expectations towards the work, expectations that they have from you, past experiences, values, interests, what they want to do in the future, and so on. The key is to understand that person’s motives and what drives him/her. All this information makes it easier for you to track and boost the results and to develop specific skills of interest.
To make sure this isn’t a one-way conversation, encourage the other person to ask you questions, or answer the questions that you’ve asked after. Below, I’ll give you some questions that you can use:
Please tell me about your past experiences: what have you accomplished and what did you enjoy the most;
Are you enjoying what you’re doing so far? Did it meet your expectations?
What do you expect to get from this role in the future?
What do you expect from me to help you perform?
Can you tell me what are your interests besides your studies and/or work?
What is your dream job/occupation?
If you have any question or feedback, feel free to share
Engage
Watching your team work for you from afar is an out-dated way of leading a team. The “Boss” style of leadership is rotting in its grave today. This part of the LEAD method is to establish a team dynamic in which all can thrive together. This means not only ensuring that you give constant positive inputs to your team but also creating a space where everyone feels the need to help each other. An ecosystem of mutual help and cooperation is beneficial in the long run.
Glorify errors and vilify indifference
Removing the fear of failure is one step to create a great working environment. If you make the norm of the team to help whoever is in need instead of judging, people will welcome their mistakes because they know that they will learn from them. This will also make it easier for you to check if someone needs training in a specific skill to increase their performance.
Encourage everyone to step up and have an active voice in the team. This is an effective way to bring up shy workers and to make every individual engaged with the team’s issues, creating the mindset: any person’s problems are my team’s problems, and my team’s problems are my own problems.
This is also the time for everyone to get used to your working method, specially the way you’re tracking your team. You need to define clear KPIs and an effective way of communicating them.
Creating an efficient KPI tracking system
In my experience as a Team Leader, when I had to recruit new members to my team, I had to create a Job Description with specific KPIs. KPI means Key Performance Indicator: not forgetting this will make your job easier. Your objective is to have them as specific and clear as possible. Also, I’ll divide them in two types of KPIs: results oriented and behavior oriented. Below is an example of a KPI tracking system for a Call Center team:
Here you can see a clear distinction between both types of KPIs. Both are important and give you different type of information for you to analyse and interpret. And that leads me to the next chapter.
Analyse
As I’ve mentioned in the beginning of this article, the Analyse part is to: analyse results, check performance and productivity, receive and analyse feedback. This is a test to how well have you defined your KPIs, because without them being clear and objective, you’re going to have a hard time.
Keeping trace of results
The most important thing after having a goal, is to know how to keep track of it. The results are your indicator of success: they do not lie!
Checking Performance and Productivity
Taking in consideration that you followed my advice on how to create an efficient KPI system, you have now two types of KPIs: Results Oriented and Behavior Oriented. What you need to do now is to define how important is each KPI, by giving them a percentage. My suggestion is to divide them making sure that they respect these margins:
70% -> 85%: Results Oriented
15% -> 30%: Behavior Oriented
Your business does not rely simply on attitude: results matter the most. So you have to downscale that to your team. This will also help you have a rational approach when deciding who’s performing better, who needs a boost on their performance, or who has to go.
Measuring Productivity
Productivity can be a good indicator on how good the processes in your team are. If everyone is following the norm and your productivity is low, instead of trying to boost your team’s performance through training, you might want to check if there’s anything failing on the customer flow for example. Productivity is a simple calculation:
Productivity = Results / ΔTime
Choosing both the Results that you want to track and the interval of time when they happen is up to you, it depends on each team’s purpose.
Communicating weekly results
Transparency is a key value that everyone in the workplace loves, and to make sure that you respect it, you need to be clear and frontal when communicating both good and bad results. Use the weekly team meetings to ensure that everyone’s aware of the team’s performance before you communicate it with the rest of the organization. If you’re in a small business sometimes it’s easier for the information to spread itself amongst everyone, but if you’re in a big enterprise (50+ people) not everyone is aware of what’s going on in other departments. It is important to share this information at least once a month. Here are the top 3 channels to use when sharing results and progress:
Email to the whole company. This is also a good follow up to any other approach you take.
Meeting with everyone involved and have a presentation. If you have space for this in the office it’s a a very good idea to bring everyone together to hear what’s been happening in the company; if not, you can always stream (this is also the option for remote working companies).
Have the results desplayed on a specific tab on your website where everyone has access to. Make sure you update it weekly.
In any of these approaches, you need to make sure that everyone reads the update, so choose the one that fits the best. Having the information synthesized will make it easier to share important info and to increase reading ratios.
Receiving and analysing feedback
We all know the saying “Two minds think better than one”, and that is a simple explanation on why feedback is so important. By collecting feedback from your team you’re receiving the most valuable information you can since it comes from the people most proximate and connected to the work itself. Feedback is also a way of showing humility towards your team. It’s the same as saying “Hey, I’d love your inputs so we can all improve together!”.
Develop
This is what distinguishes great teams/companies from others. Human investment is now a trending topic but how is it done correctly? The clue is in realising that the best advice you can get comes from yourself.
Goal Setting
If you haven’t heard about Goal Setting before, you’re missing something really important. This is a different type of Individual Meeting that occurs every two / three months and its objective is quite straight forward: defining your goals. It is important to have both long term and short term goals, since they will differ in form and purpose. It is also important to know the person’s objectives that are not work-related: asking them from time to time about what’s up in a specific issue that they’re facing or a goal that they want to achieve in their personal life makes them feel appreciated. The following image is an example that you might use.
It is also important for the interviewer to take some notes regarding the person’s reactions to certain topics, confidence about certain issues and goals, and how important is each objective. It is also important to take note on the overall disposition of the person: sad, stressed, content, happy, excited, so you can do a better follow up.
Coaching
I understand if you’re tired of hearing that coaching can do wonders without ever explaining you how to effectively make use of it, so worry not, I’m here for you!
Coahing might be the single best tool you can use on any of your team members to boost their performance and their careers. But to be a good coach, you need to understand the following: coaching has nothing to do with giving good advice, but everything to do with asking the right questions. To be a good coach, people must feel like they are facing a mirror. The questions that you’re allowed to ask are the following (or similar):
Why?
What made you feel like that?
Do you consider that a wise choice?
What would you do differently if you had the opportunity?
What have you learnt from that experience?
When starting the session, you can either approach a topic that you feel that is troubling that person or let him choose the topic that he wants to talk about. Then you follow up the topic by asking the questions above.
Professional and Personal Development
When you think about applying to a job, you have a list of reasons why, and usually one or two of them stand out: location, career perspective, jumping board to a greater job, and so on. Everyone has a reason to go work in a new company, and there’s no point trying to hide it. If you make it clear to your team leader, it will only help him guide you and help you have a better experience.
As a team leader it’s part of your JD to find out these reasons and have them as the basis for the training that you’re going to deliver. Even it that person’s objectives is to gather as much knowledge and experience as possible to then leave and go to another job, you will still benefit from improving those skills. Why? Because word of mouth is the best way to promote your business. And when that person gets the new job because of your training, and then procedes with his career, your company will always represent and important step along the way.
This is it for the second part! Thank you very much for your time :) if you liked this post, leave your ❤ and follow me to the next one ;)