Elevating Teams and Avoiding Breakdowns

There’s a relationship between productivity, quality of labor, agency, and autonomy. Good managers understand this.

A team member who is mentored and then trusted to execute their duties within the bounds of their own good sense will thrive. With continued encouragement and real incentives, these team members will exceed expectations and take on greater responsibilities.

Conversely, when staff are forced into tasks for which they are poorly suited and given little context for how this labor contributes to their success, or at least the company’s, they will eventually produce mediocre work, lose interest, and disengage. Once enough staff are pushed to this position, the team breaks down. People begin dwelling on seniority in an effort to form hierarchy that gives their work some meaning. Petty squabbling evolves into disciplinary issues and turnover quickly follows.

Managers often fail to understand the most basic fact of the workplace - a team is people first. The people working with the manager are almost universally adults with their own work and life experience. Offloading new tasks onto team members without seeking their consent, especially when it’s done by middle managers or team leads, will almost always universally fail. This is especially true where information is restricted or even scarce.

It’s extremely important to understand why organizations degrade to these bad positions. The main cause is a lack of empathy as illustrated by paternalism above but this is typically the dominion of managers who are older than their team. When supervisors are relatively the same age or even younger than team members, insecurity can cause a leader to become a boss. And while younger and less senior team members may follow a leader, elders or equals will often stifle rather than take orders. However, providing context and enlisting mature team members rather than drafting them nearly always has good results.

This is not to say that all employees will perform well under steady-handed guidance. Less mature staff sometimes mistake a leader’s efforts to seek cooperation as weakness or a lack of authority. This is why a leader sometimes has to be more direct. In the end, a good manager will not want to order anyone to do anything or have to continually reinforce procedures or processes with the team. In order to lead constructively, staff who only react well to direction are not a part of the team. They will eventually need to be removed.

In conclusion, here are a few leadership tips with brief narratives.

As a team lead, you have to hand off a responsibility. In this case, one good course of action is to show the team how to perform this task, then measure who seems most receptive even if the task is outside their normal responsibilities. Identify a couple staff who seem most qualified or interested. Talk to them separately and seek the agreement of whomever you feel is best suited.

A team member has been working on a routine task and seems to shy away from it, preferring to do other other responsibilities first, and letting the task in question sometimes remain incomplete or not even start. Think about how the task can be simplified and/or made more palatable. Then take your idea to the team member. If they still show resistance, find a task better suited to the team member and move this responsibility to a different desk.

When your team works multiple, varying roles, do not specialize so deeply that other team members find a different responsibility alien. Keep tasks from one discipline to another fairly uniform, and try to break off smaller pieces to share throughout the team. This will keep teammates familiar with multiple disciplines. But, if you find one team member excels at a particular task and enjoys it, don’t be afraid to let them explore what works best for that desk and encourage ownership.

Finally, always respect your team members’ work styles and understand that they may need time to shift gears from one task to another. This is especially true when seeking to achieve high-efficiency workflows. Even if you as supervisor need to talk to a staff member urgently, understand that they have already given priority to the existing tasks you assigned them. Work with them to establish the earliest you can speak rather than breaking into their workflow.

As the old phrase says truly, the manager who manages least manages best.

Teams in the workplace with high cohesion where consent is central and everybody’s time is respected develop levels of loyalty that are nearly unbreakable. When this attitude spreads to multiple departments within a single company, turnover declines as job satisfaction rises. As a company works together toward a common goal through strong communication, tribalism declines and efficiency rises.

Breakdowns are not inevitable when we approach every member on the team as a person rather than a task. A manager is not better than someone they manage - they are equally valuable to the company in differing roles. A great team makes a manager shine, and a great manager puts the spotlight on their team, always seeking to elevate its members.

Leadership is not a position, but a collection of actions. Good leadership avoids breakdowns by minimizing turbulence and maximizing efficiency. Great leadership achieves new heights for everyone.