Team leader

Relevant resources:

• Organizational friction
• Organizational anatomy
• Fix organizational bugs

Relevant resources

• The concept of organizational clarity
• The "How well aligned are we" survey

Establishing and communicating a team purpose and direction is a key part of ensuring existence clarity within a team.

Purpose and direction should be easily accessible, succinct and widely understood both by the team, it's stakeholders and neighbouring teams.

We've all heard it a thousand times: "People are different". Yet, few people truely understand the implications of this adage.

People are driven by different motivations, opinions, insights and personality traits, and communicating and collaborating with eachother isn't always easy.

As a team leader you should strive to facilitate your teams understanding of the idiosyncrasies of each individual team member in a way that improves consideration and reduces friction within the team.

Ad hoc communication means communication which was not planned in advance. Examples include improvised meetings, chat messages, phone calls, 1-on-1 chats at a person's desk, etc.

Ad hoc communication is usually an indication of a person not having easy access to information they need in order to do their job.

As a team leader, you should consider ad hoc communication as a symptom of an insight management problem, and constantly ask yourself "Why is this information not natively accessible to this person?".

Coordination mechanisms are roles, routines, rules, and plans that contribute to the coordination of organizational activities.

A silo is something which is isolated from something else.

In organizations, silos happen when teams focus solely on their respective departments and team-specific goals. Very often, the goals of one team may clash with the objectives of another. This can create siloed environments resistant to information-sharing. 

As a team leader, you should strive to share information and keep open lines of communication with neighbouring teams and team leaders. The ideal is for the people around you to know what your team is doing and why, and for your team to know the same of other teams.

Maintaining an easily accessible team playbook is a great way of facilitating this responsibility.

The expectations of a team and its members are constantly changing. The work of the team results in new insights about how work should be done, which in turn leads to new expectations, be it implicit or explicit ones.

Meanwhile, changing circumstances can result in existing expectations growing outdated or needing an update.

As a team leader, you need to make sure that not only new but also existing team members are constantly being fed and automating the most recent expectations of the team and their respective roles.

The Maintaining familiarity with expectations feature is a great way to ensure that you stay on top of practicing this responsibility.

In all teams, two gaps exist:

• The skills gap is the gap between what we should be able to do and what we are actually able to do
• The behavior gap is the gap between what we know we should be doing and what we actually do

A key component of improving the well-functioning of a team ss to work systematically to manage these two gaps.

The management consists of both:

• Increasing the gap by identifying useful expectations for skills and behaviour, and
• Reducing the gap by training and developing people

Here are some relevant resources for managing these gaps:

• Skillsets with insufficient proficiency
• Expectations in focus
• Ambitions
• Programs

Skillsets with insufficient proficiency

Netflix’s expense policy is famously 5 words long. It is simply "act in Netflix’s best interest."

When making decisions, acting in the best interest of the organization means to avoid hurting the organization in the short term, and helping the organization succeed and thrive in the long term.

• Which roles and responsibilities am I practicing today that could and should be delegated to someone else in the future?
• What am I reluctant to delegate and why? Do I feel people lack the proper skills? Insight? Behaviours? Motivation? Opinions?
• What can I invest in today that will free up more time for me in the future?

The delegation perspective and associated views can help improve your thinking about what can be delegated, and to whom.

Read more about Accomplishments

Observasjoner

Undersøkelser

The "How effective is my manager" survey

The "How psychologically safe is my team?" survey

In order to contribute effectively to a team, everyone team member needs to know what they are expected to prioritize, both on behalf of the team, and on behalf of themselves.

Communicating clear and up-to-date priorities ensures that each team member focuses their attention, time and cognitive capacity on what is expected to produce the most impact and value.

As a team leader, it is your responsibility to ensure that everyone in your team has a clear set of priorities, and to support and hold your team members accountable to making progress towards those priorities.

Use the focus dashboard of the Wecomplish platform to make the priorities of an individual clear and transparent to everyone, and use Check-in (one-on-one) in order to support and hold people accountable to those priorities.

The concept of insight management

Insight management basics skillset

Team playbook as a concept

How to manage roles and responsibilities within the platform.

Not too many and not too few.

Checklist for offboarding someone from a role.

Checklist for onboarding someone in a new role

When unwanted incidents occur, the opportunity presents itself to analyze what went wrong and to put in place mechanisms which reduce the chance of a similar incident recurring.

It's not sufficient just for the people in the team to learn from incidents, we also want the team as an entity to learn, ensuring that incidents do not repeat within the team, even if the people have since moved on.

Use tools like blameless post mortems to understand, communicate and learn from what went wrong. Then, operationalize post mortem findings by adding to or amending coordination mechanisms like responsibilities, skills, processes, checklists, policies, etc.

Explore

• The concept of operationalization
• Operationalization as an organizational pillar
• Operationlization as a perspective
• How to organize team expectations
• How to organize role expectations
• How to review and follow up on operationalization

Operationalization review

Resources:

• Organizational pillars
• The traits of a high-functioning team
• Avoid a dysfunctionl team
• Survey:  How healthy is our team/organization.

A busy team can easily get caught up in an execution-loop, focusing solely on executing work and neglecting documentating and improving how work gets done.

As a team leader you should strive to maintain a healthy balance between delivering on the results expected from the team, and ensuring that the way the team works is cleary articulated and improved upon in order to improve effectiveness and efficiency in the future.

The Wecomplish platform makes it clear who is assigned which roles, and which responsibilities those roles entail.

However, that does not automatically ensure that people actually practice those responsibilities. In some cases their familiarity might be low, in others they might not have set aside sufficient time to practice the responsibility.

As team leader it is your responsibility to ensure that your team members carry out their responsibilities in a manner which you see fit and consider sufficient based on their current role maturity and the overall priorities of the team.

Use the role list of team members if you need help remembering the responsibilities each individual is expected to practice, and Expectations in focus to communicate which specific expectations you would like people to improve their familiarity with or practice more.

Bruke en sjekkliste

Apply a process

Use Assessments to communicate potential.

Use Ambitions to agree on improvement potential.

Use Expectations in focus to break down specific expectations to focus on.

Use Explore familiarity to learn about the current familiarity of your team members and Development over time to learn about recent updates to their familiarity development.

Use Requesting familiarity updates to request familiarity updates where missing, or to request an update of expectations in focus.

Alternatively, use check-in to follow up with an individual more closely, including both their projects, objectives and expectations in focus.

Use Skillsets with insufficient proficiency to identify gaps between how proficient people's roles require them to be, and how proficient they actually are.

Everyone has the potential to improve, and with a growth mindset, we also have the ability to.

However, in order to identify what to work on, it's beneficial to get some outside council as it can be difficult and even painful to identify and address our own weaknesses.

As a team leader, your interaction with team members and observations of how team members interact with eachother puts you in a great position to identify weaknesses.

Use this insight to carefully and considerately communicate to your team what they might benefit from improving in, and discuss how you can help them address the obstacles they experience.

If you are unfamiliar or uncomfortable identifying and addressing weaknesses on an ongoing basis, you might find it useful to associate a weekly, recuring allocation to this responsibility and use the My team view as a tool to reflect on the potential of individual team members.

KPI

Resources:

• Health checks within the platform
• Health checks as a perspective
• Health checks in the library

Any team is subject to risk due to the nature of its work. The key is identifying and mitigating these risks in a way that is considered manageable and sufficient by the team and it's stakeholders.

Resources

• Risks as a perspective
• Risk management withinin the platform.

Use the "How well do I master basic management behaviours?" survey to reflect your current ability to master the behaviours required by a great leader.

Use the "How effective is my manager?" survey to collect feedback from your team members on how they experience being led by you.

Depending on how experienced you are and how well you are ranked by yourself and your team, the frequency of how often you conduct these surveys may range anywhere from 3 - 12 months.

Set a weekly reminder to review and update your familiarity your expectations in focus, roles and ambitions.

The team purpose helps set a direction for the team. The strategy explains how the team plans to move towards that purpose.

Depending on the maturity and dynamism of the team and organization, a strategy can be a detailed plan looking several years into the future, or a set of objectives which will brings the team the next steps closer to fulfilling its purpose.

My team

Check-in (one-on-one)

This video discusses the concept of "weekly accountability talks" (from 6:40 - 7:53):

Includes:

• Identifying and removing obstacles
• Asking questions that make people think
• Holding people accountable to their responsibilities and priorities

It's easy to get caught up doing work, and as a result neglect improving how effectively and efficiently we complete said work.

As leader, it's your responsibility to enable, support and develop your team members so as to make them continously better at practicing the responsibilities and skills expected of their roles.

Use the "People" tab in the Priorities-section of your Focus-dashboard or the separate My team-page to review the support-card of who report to you, and reflect on how you can best help them move forward.

For input into how to read and reflect the support card of each individual, please review the My team-documentation.

Use the platform features Unclear expectations and Mentorship to identify specific role expectations that are poorly understood or require support.

Relevant resources:

• Expectation design skillset
• Organizational clarity article

As a team leader, one of your most important responsibilities is to get your team members to perform at the top of their game.

Being part of a team where the team members are motivated, properly supported and focused makes a world of difference when it comes to both delivering results and enjoying the experience.

From a birds eye view, this responsibility consists of two steps:

1. Communicate clear and reasonable expectations
2. Check in with team members regularly (preferably weekly) in order to
   1. Motivate them
   2. Identify blockers
   3. Support them
   4. Hold them accountable to their priorities

A specific way of practicing this responsibility is to set aside time weekly in order to review and reflect on to which extent your team 

• Is aware of and familiar their expectations
• Have clear and up-to-date priorities
• Require assistance meeting expectations
• Have access to proper support and mentorships

Use the "My team"-tab on the Focus-dashboard, or the separate "My team"-page as the basis for your analysis.

You may also consider using the Check-in (one-on-one) functionality for a structured and predictable approach to checking in with each individual on a regular basis.

For a more holistic approach to this responsibility, check out the skillset Proactive leadership.

People are always trying to snag other peoples time and attention in an attempt to make their own lifes easier. Your job is to protect your team members from this intuitive behaviour so that they can remain laser focused on their responsibilities and priorities.

If your team consists of creatives/maker roles (designers, developers, etc), the classic Maker's Schedule, Managers's Schedule essay by Paul Gramam is a relevant read.

Systems