Leadership is a key pillar to any truly accomplished manager’s success. If you are in a management position and your team is spending more time creating problems than performing like a well-oiled machine, it is time to do some serious self-analysis.
Clearly, the problem is that your team is not following their leader down the right path, and, just so we are clear, the fires they are starting around the office are your problem to fix. Fortunately, there are many great leadership strategies you can use to whip your team into shape and help them to start performing at the level at which you expect them to perform. Here are four strategies to consider.
Single Out The Problem Starters
It occurs to you that all problems begin somewhere. Generally, there will be some members of your team that are just not in step with the program you have set forth for them to follow. As the manager who is assuming responsibility for your team’s performance, it is your job to isolate the members that are the source of the majority of the problems with which your team is being hampered.
Once you figure out who these individuals are, it is going to be necessary for you to pull them aside in private and have a talk with them about how to best get them to follow the program you have set forth for your team to follow. This will boil things down to two strategies of approaching these individuals.
The first strategy will involve clarifying what you expect out of these individuals, and their willingness to follow your lead and do what is expected of them. The second strategy will involve the matter of terminating those members of your team who simply will not fall into line. If you have a hard time with this second strategy, then the continued messes that arise from team members that foil your team’s success will rest solely on your shoulders for not making the right decision.
For this reason, you must be firm and be ready to exercise your authority as a manager even if it means doing something that is uncomfortable. Remember, your duty is to the executives to which you answer to, and they expect marked improvement, not failure, from your team and its members.
According to Monster.com, you should always work with the HR department of your company when you suspect a termination strategy is needed to deal with a member of your team who is not or will not perform to your specifications. While this may not make the decision any more pleasant to carry out, your company’s HR department should be able to help you make sure you take the right actions that best serve all parties involved.
Assessing The Means
A third strategy to take when dealing with your team is assessing the means by which they operate from to do what you ask. Is what you are asking of your team within reach given the resources at their fingertips? While you may not have considered the reality of this all important question, it is a question that a lot of manager level types fail to ask themselves as they watch their team chase its tail in endless circles of failure.
Your team may be trying to do as you ask, but the resources they are working with may simply not be adequate enough to achieve the goals you have put in place. In this situation, it is your duty to speak with someone in a position of authority on their behalf to get them the resources they need to do the job you expect.
Again, success in this area of team leadership falls squarely on your shoulders, so do not drop the ball and leave your team operating in dire straits.
Self-Improvement
The fourth strategy you must consider when leading a team out of mayhem into success is to evaluate your own performance as a leader in a huge way. Any great leader must engage in some form of self-evaluation to truly have a sense of how to lead people down the right path, and they must articulate from there how to create a pattern of continued successes.
Sometimes this evaluation strategy is beyond the manager’s own level of expertise. For this reason, they may need to attend a strategic leadership training workshop that provides them with a new skills and tools for how to see, grasp and work with the big picture so that they can better lead their team with a strategic plan that is truly effective. It may also be a good idea to send your employees to team building training to help the entire office improve collectively.
While this may mean a little hard work and effort on the part of a manager, the payoff is that they will be better fit to lead their team in new paths of success they did not formerly have the ability to do on their own. Such individuals truly become architects of the future and help to keep their company on the leading edge.
As a manager, it is your job to keep mayhem at a minimum and ensure that your team operates like a well-oiled machine. Preventing problems before they get out of hand is by far the best way to make sure this is how your team functions. As the leader of your team, you must remember that you need to make those decisions that best enables your team to give you their best. This is how genuine success as a manager is achieved.