Creating leaders is not an easy task, it involves trust, accountability, and responsibility (from both you and the leaders you are creating). One of the first aspects of creating and leading people to become leaders is to stop making their decisions for them. You have to increase their ability to make decisions, which means communicating goals well at each level and allowing them to execute. As you do that, you also have to tell them they are responsible for those decisions or they won't know and won't take on that responsibility.
What you should try to do here is not to create one leader and move someone "into management" or finding a "team lead", the true goal is to turn everyone into a leader of their domain. Every person on your team was hired for a reason, whether that was skill, culture fit, or any other reason you had at the start, you have to give them the ability to lead in their distinction within their team. Otherwise, they will likely be less satisfied in their work, under-challenged, and underutilized.
How do you start?
This is no easy task. Starting to build leaders will significantly change the way your team communicates. It will encourage people to lean into conflict and be okay being uncomfortable for a while, they will get used to it and will likely end up appreciating the honesty and transparency they can now bring to the table.
Four ideas for creating a team of leaders:
- Give everyone a voice
- Stop making all the decisions
- Take responsibility
- Teach them to coach others, not do for others.
Give Everyone a Voice
The first step is ensuring that everyone on the team is allowed to speak equally. Often some personality types assert themselves and are more vocal than others. To flip the script we often need the most vocal person on the team to be the one that helps begin the process. We have to ask more questions of every person and be willing to listen more.
There is an intricate balance between stopping the people who are currently the most vocal, in a hopefully positive way and encouraging others to speak freely, and getting them to speak without fear. The fear of being wrong is always present and must be removed so that non-judgmental discourse can take place and everyone can grow together.
As we work to balance out the voice of the team, people will are likely to be hurt if they don't understand why. Vocal people will feel the change the most because the facilitator of the change will on occasion have to actually stop them from speaking. The facilitator of the change will also need to introduce conflict, a good way forward is to use initial conflicts as a protection mechanism. Begin addressing moments where one person has been judgmental, aggressive, or overbearing toward another and eliminate that. Explain to them and the group why that kind of language can't be tolerated. As an example, if people are presenting ideas and someone states that an idea is "Ridiculous" the facilitator needs to jump in and confront that statement.
Conflict is an important part of everyone having a voice. Often it is also the most uncomfortable part (at least at the beginning). Once a team has learned to speak without judgment, real conflict can begin. What I mean by real conflict is that the conflict is occurring over ideas, not over a dissonance between people.
Removing the fear of wrong
How do you feel when you have been wrong?
How did people around you react?
Do you think they still remember that you were wrong?
Do you think they are holding it against you?
On both sides of someone being wrong reactions and responses have to be controlled, whenever a person is wrong there needs to be a response to fix the information and avoid linking that incorrectness or failure to the person directly. Why did they have the wrong information in the first place? It is often a result of a miscommunication somewhere else along the line.
For example, with a complex task, if it takes you an hour to understand a complex task. Then you share a summary or high-level overview with a coworker who will be the executor of the task for five minutes, which clearly will not be enough for them to do it correctly. Don't try to speed through important information, it will cost more in the long run if the task has to be redone, or worse is incorrect and unnoticed silently affecting the organization in the background.
On the other side of being wrong, is the person who stated something incorrectly. When they are presented with the fact that they are wrong they have to think critically about the new information and adopt it. If they lash out, then the team's ability to think critically and callout mistakes are hindered. Since trust is built slowly, this kind of reaction can harm a team for a long time because it quickly destroys any trust and connection that the team has. In the beginning, the facilitator or leader of the group needs to curb the lashing out by addressing it in the moment, over time the entire team will be able to address it as they collectively work to create a strong accepting environment.
Don't have a "hero"
As an example of something that would hinder a team and is all too common. We will start with a guy named "Kevin" (not a real person, sorry Kevin's of the world). Kevin is very smart and very vocal, he helps the entire team with their problems. Leaders identify him as "the" team leader so they want him to be in everything. You may restructure meetings because the team believes it needs Kevin's input. Kevin does not dissuade people of this idea either, from his point of view if he is going to help everyone with their problems he needs to know about everything. He also values being needed and asked for help.
If you begin to see this, it is a warning sign that responsibility is not evenly spread throughout a team. All the responsibility is increasingly and unfairly being directed into a single person. This is not sustainable for a team of any size and especially for a team that is growing. As more and more work turns to Kevin there will be symptoms that you may begin to see in other team members, for now, let's dive into one, complacency. Team members may become complacent in learning the systems, directing real decisions to Kevin since he knows what to do quickly which is faster than researching, thinking, and learning on your own. Once this kind of complacency sets in, it is extremely hard to break and will often only be broken as a result of something drastic, like losing Kevin (he didn't die, he just quit).
As Kevin's workload increases, often as a result of an inability to say no to requests for help. He can no longer handle the tasks he was primarily responsible for in the first place often resulting in longer hours, missed tasks, and failed projects. This is not healthy or sustainable for Kevin or the business and the feelings continue to compound as the problems aren't removed or reduced. Kevin will most likely leave the organization.
How to avoid having a "hero"
To avoid having a "hero", start the conversation of creating leaders with any current "heroes" you have. Address the "hero" directly and guide them into understanding the impact they are having on the team. It is hard for people to step back from their day to day work and analyze how they are affecting and potentially limiting the people around them.
Be on the lookout for gaps in responsibility and knowledge, they build quickly. When someone has more knowledge people will turn to them more and more. Seek to codify your knowledge, write what you do down, write down how you make decisions, write down how you work with others when people ask questions write down the answers. As you consistently point people to your collection of codified knowledge they learn to find information for themselves and will come to you with more impactful questions. The spreading of knowledge will create a stronger culture of learning, seeking out information, and thinking critically.
It is very hard to identify if you are the "hero", you may see yourself as helping others and learning about things as you go. A few things to look out for that will help you identify if you are becoming a bottleneck for the team you are on.
- Are people asking you questions that are easy to find (on google, or in your documentation)?
- Have people thought about solutions and drawbacks before coming to you?
- Are you the only one proposing ideas?
There are many more questions that can help you identify whether or not you are the "hero" for your team. The ones above are an excellent starting point.*
- If you are working with people new to the team, ensure you are guiding them through your thinking process and look out for these scenarios still happening regularly after 3-4 months.
Continued in Leaders are Built (Part 2)