A 4-point plan for managers to be better leaders of the teams they have

There are times and places when we as leaders look around and notice our surroundings. We see what resources we have available (both tangible and human), what opportunities await, and where we are in the scheme of accomplishing our goals. In a work context, many leaders have not felt they could exhale much less hold themselves accountable to take inventory for a while.

After enjoying a competitive market for years, we leaders were side-lined first by a global pandemic. Then, for myriad reasons, we clung to our wits—and employees—during the Great Resignation and after. Those who were left faced a looming recession while completing the work of entire teams with reduced resources either deliberately or as a result of the changes.

Change is on the horizon among the ranks of global leadership and the agendas that will be pursued. There are neither guarantees nor assurances that what is available today will remain indefinitely. As we look to the next era, we may want to throw our hands up in defeat or take a more resolute approach.

If you believe you can accomplish greatness with the right people on the bus, it is time to take an honest hard look at your surroundings. If a mental inventory results in a sigh where you’re thinking “Is the best we can do?” it is time to create change.

When we work with our clients and colleagues, we underscore the importance of believing we are leaders, not followers driven by circumstance. We can determine how we wish to be seen and act but also create change and frame our environment for success. When we lead authentically, we are empowered to determine who we work with, how we work together, and what culture we should both espouse and enact.

Establish your goals and identify success

As the leader, it is your job to be clear on the goals that define success and what needs to be accomplished to celebrate. A cornerstone of team effectiveness is ensuring all members know what they are expected to do, and have the tools and authority to do it.

It is up to you, the leader, to communicate what is expected of your team to succeed and determine if the team’s reaction (readiness to perform and/or learn) is what you need. As frustrating as some elements of team leadership may be, if there is no clarity on the desired future state for your part of the organization, how do you know if you have the right people?

Knowing and conveying the goals in a way that establishes clear expectations that also seem attainable is critical for team success and happiness. No one enjoys being held to standards that haven’t been communicated, and it can be frustrating as a leader when direct reports aren’t completing the work you believe they should be capable of doing. If your team does not understand how they should be doing, they are set up for failure…as are you, their leader. Authentic leaders can convey expectations and the vision for their teams, aligning their priorities and those of their direct reports with the needs of the organization.

As you identify your goals, transparency is a key element in enabling trust-building between leaders and teams. In this context, transparency isn’t just ‘saying what you think,’ but rather establishing a definition of success and the milestones that each member of the team must achieve to meet that definition. If there is too much ambiguity in a role or its measured expectations, employees may not be aligning their efforts with the ultimate goals of the organization.

Uncertainty can lead to conflict and frustration, while clearly defined responsibilities enable employees to know what success can be. With transparency, employees can focus on the issues that matter, while you evaluate where some coaching may be needed to build a stronger team.

All of these elements together are essential to creating your plan and determining how everyone ‘fits’ into the bus you’re driving as a leader. In other words, it is up to you to determine how the members of your team best align with the work you are responsible for achieving. Without this, it isn’t possible to know if the team you have is the team you need.

Understand what you’re working with

When we begin working with clients, the first step is to conduct a needs analysis. This phase of work establishes the current status, the drivers and derailers, the sponsors and detractors. The same approach is recommended for a leader ready to take an earnest look at the team’s attributes and liabilities. Understanding what you’re working with requires a clear understanding of what expectations to map performance against.

It is understood that there are three main types of job expectations: functional, emotional, and relational. Employees must be clear on the roles they are supposed to play and the associated tasks to complete both in the context of their team’s accountabilities and their professional relationships with one another. It cannot be understated how infrequently leaders really comprehend the extent of their own jobs in the context of the organization’s greater goals, so providing this clarity is not always easy.

For better or for worse, leaders must be honest about the work they need to get done and how current team members are contributing to these goals. Taking the time to craft a clear view of what “success” is and then compile associated metrics (quantitative and qualitative) is key.

Satisfactory job performance and managing professional relationships should also be made clear. This rubric will not likely match the general company’s performance review. These exercises rarely measure job performance to this level of detail. Therefore, we encourage you to define “success” for yourself and your employees.

With a measurement method established, each team member should be evaluated to ensure the team you have fits the work you are responsible for delivering at the level you should be capable of.

Here it is extremely important for the leader to ignore any halos that may loom from prior performance and to be honest about what the employee is contributing now. How well is each individual actually performing against what you need from them? Where do they fit into the team bus? As the leader, it is your responsibility to understand if your team is in optimal condition to deliver the work you are responsible for, or whether that team may need some coaching to get there.

Make it personal

If you ask a good leader about their team, they will know who is thriving, who is trying, and who has been loafing against their current assessment of the big picture. When you’ve done the work to create a psychologically safe space where employees feel comfortable asking questions and making mistakes, a lack of performance is often not a problem of what is happening, but rather the whys and hows leading to poor execution.

An exercise we often run with clients is to ask leaders several questions about their teams. Among them, we ask work-related questions like what each direct report really thrives at doing…and personal questions, like the names of spouses/partners, children, and what hobbies they like to do over the weekends. We find that, while getting personal is not everyone’s style, knowing about team members’ lives offers context to what they bring to work each day.

For example:

A breakfast cook who was well-loved for his creative recipes and agreeable attitude when he arrived at 5 AM. When he came in late a few mornings, his boss was annoyed. When his eyes were also red and glassy, his boss sent him out for a drug test. The boss didn’t know what everyone else in the kitchen did: The cook had never used drugs a day in his life, he needed his job to pay medical bills for his terminally ill son, and his wife’s job as a nurse on the graveyard shift made childcare hard to manage. It led to problems in their marriage. The cook could not believe his boss sent him to get tested. He felt that had his boss ever asked “Hey, are things okay?” and shown some compassion, it would have felt like someone cared about him. He would have worked even harder. Instead, after the demonstrated lack of concern, he became withdrawn, resentful, and quit soon after.

There won’t always be a good reason for being distracted, but there is sometimes if you pause to listen. For every situation where someone is not performing to their fullest potential, it is worthwhile to ask “What’s going on?” If a show of kindness and a moment of listening can help an employee, it is worth making the effort to potentially motivate or even turn things around.

Strengthen what you have

Leading today must be shaped by the environment in which we are working. If you have examined your team and found performance gaps, you likely can do better. Perhaps there are places where employees may not be well fit for the work, maybe your team needs a different skill set, or maybe you feel the team needs to come up with a better way.

Structuring your team for what you need doesn’t mean wholesale replacement, particularly in the current climate of fiscal uncertainty and challenges with hiring. Instead, it is likely time to strengthen what you have. Strategic talent management is not only the job of Human Resource departments. Two of the top three reasons people quit their jobs is because they do not feel valued by their company or manager.

It’s hard to feel good about your job if you are not doing the right work or continue to flail in your attempts. As the leader, it is also your role to find opportunities to build your human capital. Establishing a talent pipeline will structure your team for the future to ensure you have the employees with the skills you need when you need them.

Working with the team you have starts with identifying ways to build upon and optimize the skills they already possess. Upskilling enables employees to execute on higher level or deeper skill sets competently. It is a way to identify a path for employees to advance their training specific to those goals and requirements that you have outlined in your vision and expectations.

As a leader, it is important to identify how to obtain additional skills, and how those skills apply to the job requirements. In addition, as organizations have learned, providing direct paths for employees to self-advocate for desired additional training while providing multiple routes for obtaining that professional development provides an internal ladder for success and growth. From an organizational perspective, prioritizing opportunities and support for upskilling builds talent from within, taking advantage of one of the most important resources: your current employees.

Maximizing the human capital you already have within your team may mean making a better match between the skills your employees already have to different job responsibilities. Sometimes called talent matching, there may be a better person for some roles than the employee currently doing them.

When leaders are honest in their evaluations of talent and how they align (or don’t) to the responsibilities involved with each job, it may become clear that there are mismatches that impact job performance.

Seventy percent of employees feel their sense of purpose is defined by their work. What if you were to take the step to match tasks and roles to the competencies of the talent you have? The work itself may improve, and your team may feel more valued and engaged in doing the work they are excited to do.

In any organization, one of our fundamental obligations as leaders is to build the team of the future, while we get the work done today. Establishing an effective talent pipeline is a way to ensure that you can tap into and apply the skills needed at every level. Nurturing a succession plan should be one of a leader’s highest priorities. Having the right people on the bus in the future requires us to ensure we have a plan to manage talent to get there today.

Just as you would not fire your child from the family for failing a test, the authentic leader will not dismantle a team for making mistakes. Your job is to identify the derailers and the showstoppers, determine what is and is not in your team’s control to reconcile, and then create a path for your team to accomplish its goals.

If you can change the culture, augment learning opportunities, or simply be a person who listens, you may find your team really responds in positive ways. A true leader learns about their team, develops their competencies to adjust to potential and real changes, and finds a way to build a team that is as good as it gets.