PERSONAL STRATEGIES FOR TEAM LEADERS

If you are focusing on your performance as a team leader, continue on this page. If your interest is in the development or one or more of your team members, consider sponsoring them directly, or through your HR/OD person, in Strategies for Leadership for Team Members so they can learn what it means to take responsibility for oneself as a team member.

As the leader of a management, functional, project, cross-functional or cross-organizational team you, however, are held accountable for your team's performance including its formation, development and focus. To take full responsibility requires you to model for your team, in your own behavior:

1) High Bandwidth Leadership - Accomplish more by relieving stress-created bottlenecks to implementation. 

2) Collaboration for Innovation - Tap the innovative resources hidden in underdeveloped relationships. 

3) Articulating a Vision - Communicate an actionable understanding of individual and shared motivations.

This approach is grounded in the realities of your experience and situation rather than in the mythologies of conventional wisdom or wishful thinking. I help you identify and work with your real motivations for accepting this responsibility and to show you how those can guide your leadership. The work takes place in and between weekly Leadership Conversations.

Check that implementing the strategies below is what you need to do and then, to find out if I am really the person to help you, schedule a preliminary, no obligation, Leadership Conversation.

"Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because s/he wants to do it." Dwight Eisenhower

1) High Bandwidth Leadership - Reduced stress and friction increases capacity for implementation.

Leadership Bandwidth is the capacity to get things done with others and it increases as friction and stress in working relationships are removed. We experience high bandwidth leadership when everything satisfyingly comes together. Then we are empowered, stress-free and relate much more effectively.

In working relationships, stress can show up in each of us as habitually adopted roles. When we add to the stress of the role to the stress caused by our assumptions about others' roles, we get into a stress spiral! This can be momentary, causing us to loose an opportunity in an existing relationship or it can be habitual, making the establishment of productive relationships quite difficult. After such encounters we can find ourselves blaming the other person for their attitude or kicking ourselves when we recognize the missed opportunity.

The challenge is to develop a real time relational awareness, an awareness of our behavior and the ways others respond to us. Only when we have identified the nature of our working relationships, the roles we and others play under stress, can we take responsibility and adapt our approach to reduce friction and tension and increase our leadership bandwidth.

High bandwidth practices are discovered and narrower ones broadened or discarded in Leadership Conversations. You can expect to learn powerful new practices even in the first conversation and only four or five may be needed for you to significantly increase your leadership bandwidth.

"Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation." Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

2) Collaboration for Innovation - Tapping resources hidden in underdeveloped working relationships.

While technology makes information sharing so much easier, collaboration and innovation still depend upon the intentions of those sharing. Virtual does not necessarily mean virtuous. The new leadership challenge is to bring real collaboration to an increasingly virtual world.

If you grew up among collaborative relationships, where everyone was a winner, chances are you have long experienced the freedom with others that is necessary for innovation. Many of us, however, learned our behaviors in a competitive culture of winners and losers and find collaboration difficult if not impossible. We may have thought that we collaborated when we followed but that was just cooperating, which can be helpful but doesn't lead to innovation.

Leaders struggle between the demand for results from today's implementation and the knowledge that future success also mandates innovation today. Fortunately, it is unnecessary to de-prioritize innovation when we can tap into the resources existing in underdeveloped, collaborative relationships among team-members, whether employees, investors, customers, competitors, providers or partners.

The tactics of Collaboration for Innovation can be learned during a series of Leadership Conversations leading to an enhanced self awareness that helps us take greater responsibility for our participation, according to whether the need is for implementation or innovation.

"Visualization and belief in a pattern of reality activates the creative power of realization." A. L. Lina

3) Articulate a Vision - Communicate an actionable understanding of your motivations.

You can help a person find their motivation or inspiration when your words or actions resonate with their intentions so they can then see a way forward. Imaginative people may perceive something visual but what we all "see" in our "mind's eye" is a perception of a deeply held understanding of what is important - our values. A vision is values made visible. To aspire to a vision is to open up to inspiration that will ground us further in our values. When we articulate a vision we recognize what is valuable in ourselves and in others, and others recognize that in us. When we articulate a shared vision we become united in its values.

Individual and team success lies in accomplishing what you and the team value most, and these values made visible constitute your vision of success. When you or your team aspire to a vision of success you are open to whatever reinforces the values of success that you hold, whatever touches your emotions and stimulates your individual or shared motivations. This vision of success is empowering because it affirms what's relevant, suggests what's possible and informs how it can be realized. It is actionable.

Practically, in Leadership Conversations, an individual or team articulates his/her/their vision using an interpretive structure that can become a physical or virtual desktop object. (You can see an example in A Vision of Leadership for Collaboration and Innovation.) New light is shed on assumptions and opportunities emerge that were not apparent before. This object can be used to reflect upon, focus communication and provide a powerful context for action. Reflection, communication and feedback refine the vision, further focusing individual and collective energies.

"The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another person's observation, not overturning it." Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

Leadership Conversations for a Team-Leader

Leadership Conversations are developmental conversations for leaders and members of management, project, functional, cross-functional and cross-organizational teams, sponsoring executives and HR, OD and Learning professionals or for independent learners.

Conducted by Chris Newham, one-on-one or with an intact team, in person, on the phone or on line, they are designed to support you as you increasingly take personal responsibility by developing High Bandwidth Leadership, Collaborating to Innovate, and Articulating a Vision. You identify new leadership practices to apply in the workplace following each conversation.

Individually, leaders and members learn to manage themselves in their working relationships, acquiring a deeper appreciation for the contexts in which they work and the personal alternatives they have for shaping outcomes. Together, leaders and members develop an appreciation for what each can best contribute to their collective effectiveness and strengthen the leadership culture of their team.

If you are considering a program as participant or sponsor, you can request a complementary, preliminary Leadership Conversation without further obligation.