Leadership: Part 1 covered “Forget your career, focus on your team”, and real-world examples of the first 5 of 10 leadership principles:
1. Achieve professional competence.
2. Appreciate your own strengths and limitations and pursue self-improvement.
3. Seek and accept responsibility.
4. Lead by example.
5. Make sure that your followers know your meaning and intent, then lead them to the accomplishment of the mission.
Here we start looking at the next five.
6. Know your team and promote their welfare.
This one is achieved from your regular 1:1 meetings with your team. Instead of sitting in a meeting room, go for a 10-minute walk outside the office. Let the team member drive the conversation. You can serve your team better when you know them as individuals, not as roles.
7. Develop the leadership potential of your followers.
Especially important when you want to take a vacation. Start by having your team leads run your daily Scrums.
I was on the road for six months, training clients and implementing software. I came back to the office to hear about one poorly-performing QA analyst that was chronically absent, and when present, was falling asleep at his desk. The team lead said, “I’m just trying to do my job, I don’t want to hear about this.” This told me it wasn’t a problem with the sleeping analyst, but with the team lead that needed some management training to deal with a problem employee.
8. Make sound and timely decisions.
I wish that “sound” and “timely” always meant “correct”, but this is not the reality in a fast-paced dev studio. You WILL make mistakes, and you WILL make decisions that you will need to adjust or scrap later – this is management life.
One manager I worked with demanded infinite detail before making a decision. Explorations. Research. PowerPoint decks and more meetings to explore the alternatives. This was make-busy work that frustrated her team, and a decision should have been made days or weeks before. You have to strike a balance between knowing enough (which will never be enough, so deal with it) and making a damned decision. You can always change it, if you need to, but make it!
9. Train your followers as a team, and employ them up to their capabilities.
If you ignore this one, it will solve itself. Resentment will brew in the team for perceived favouritism if you focus only on one or two people, and under-employed, unhappy-yet-valuable team members will leave. FYI, 90% of job resignations aren’t due to low pay or lack of advancement opportunities – 90% of the time, people quit a manager, not a company. That’s you.
10. Keep your followers informed of the mission, the changing situation and the overall picture.
Daily team meetings, period. It’s the basis of Scrum, after all, whether or not you use full Scrum methodology.
Every team that has never done dailies has complained to me about the inefficiency of yet another meeting. Keep it to 15 minutes max, and I mean MAX. If you ever miss a daily meeting due to other emergencies, watch how quickly people complain that the meeting was cancelled. This is because daily meetings create immense value.
Also, as a manager, when it comes to your turn to speak up about your tasks (I usually start or end with my tasks), it’s all right to say that you don’t know yet what your major tasks of the day are. Many managers do a lot of fire-fighting, so this is expected. Hearing a rendering programmer tell you that they don’t know what they’re going to be doing for several days in a row, however, tells you what you need to address.
Here’s a dirty little secret that they don’t teach you in Scrum training. The main benefit isn’t from the team sharing the information in the meeting. The meeting is too short to start collaborative discussions anyhow, and most people are thinking about what they’re going to say when their turn comes up. This means that they’re only subconsciously listening to the people that speak before them.
No, the biggest benefit of a daily Scrum doesn’t come from the meeting itself, but from the social interaction and offshoot, informal meetings that individuals have as they leave the meeting area. Result: better team communication all around.
That’s all 10 Principles of Leadership. Any thoughts? What works for you, and what can be added to the list? I’d love to hear from you.
IMG Consulting 