Strategies for Leadership for Team Members

PERSONAL STRATEGIES FOR TEAM MEMBERS

Being a team-member does not mean always being a follower. Membership requires leadership contributions, much of the time from your particular specialization but often and more importantly, in terms of leading oneself and taking responsibility for one's own behavior and contributions.

If you are worried about the performance of your team and have wondered what you can do about it, remember you can only change your own performance! It will take all the team members to bring about a substantial change and when each of you see that at appropriate times you are leading yourselves, then you really will see change!

Strategies for Leadership for Team-Members are implemented in and between Leadership/Membership Conversations and support team-members in:

1) High Bandwidth Membership - Accomplishing more by relieving the stress-created bottlenecks to contribution.

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

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

If these strategies (detailed below) are relevant to your team there are several things you can consider: 1. Email this page with your recommendations to your team leader and/or your HR/OD person. 2. Schedule a no-obligation, preliminary Leadership Conversation for guidance in introducing Strategies for Leadership to your organization. 3. If you are considering independently enrolling in a program, check out Strategies for Leadership for the Independent Learner.

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

High Bandwidth Membership

Increased contribution from reduced stress and friction in working relationships.

Bandwidth is your capacity to get things done with your fellow team-members and it increases as friction and stress in your working relationships are removed. You have experienced high bandwidth membership when everything has satisfyingly come together. You were then empowered, stress-free, and related most effectively.

Stress often shows up as unconsciously adopted roles. If you adopt these and add your unconscious assumptions about your team-leader's or fellow team-member's roles, a stress spiral begins! This effect can result in a momentary lost opportunity or it can be habitual, and make the establishment of productive relationships quite difficult. After such an encounter you might find yourself blaming others for their attitude or kicking yourself when, after the stress of the encounter has passed, you recognize the missed opportunity.

The challenge is to access your real time relational awareness, an awareness of your behavior and how others respond. Only when you have identified the real nature of your working relationships, the roles you and other team-members play under stress, can you see how to change your approach, reducing friction and tension.

You can discover high bandwidth practices and broaden or discard narrower ones in Membership 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

Collaboration for Innovation - Tapping the resources hidden in underdeveloped 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 supporting an enhanced self awareness that guides specific kinds of 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

Articulate a Vision - Express an actionable understanding of your motives

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 Members of a Team

Leadership Conversations are developmental conversations, in and between which team-members implement their individual and collective Strategies for Leadership.

Conducted by Chris Newham, either in person or on line, individually or with the team, they are designed to support you as you Increase your Bandwidth, Collaborate to Innovate, and Aspire to a Vision. In each conversation you identify new leadership practices to apply with your team-members and, in the next conversation, further refine them.

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

To learn more about of Strategies for Leadership, you're invited to participate in a preliminary Leadership Conversation without further obligation.