By Charlie Gilkey, CEO of Productive Flourishing, an advisor, author and podcaster. His latest book is Team Habits.
Leadership and productivity connect in a number of concrete and nonobvious ways. Both collective and individual leadership on a team have an outsized impact on productivity.
Good leaders, over time, create environments where their teams excel. Bad leaders, over time, take a good team—full of good people with great capabilities—and cripple them so much that they are no longer productive. How do you ensure you’re among the good?
Adjust your leadership approach.
Any of us who’ve worked in a team (good or bad) have experienced the effects of the leader (good or bad). Understanding why and how positive workplace dynamics are formed is the art of leadership.
But great leadership is also about knowing what posture you need to adopt in a given situation. Too many leaders only have one posture. They might be a top-down leader when their team needs someone ready to lead from the bottom, side by side with them on the front lines. Or you might be a leader who likes to lead more subtly from behind the scenes when your team needs a more visible and vocal leader. The trick is figuring out what your team needs at each moment to achieve the best results.
Any shift in leader posture requires leaders to be adaptable and responsive to the needs of their teams in the moment. This can include broad approaches like:
• Creating an environment of open communication where team members can share their ideas, concerns and feedback, or
• Empowering team members with decision-making authority and chances to take ownership.
Specific posture changes have their place, too:
• Leading from the ranks includes the idea of leading by example and modeling the behavior you want to see (like being transparent, honest and accountable).
• Leading from the front might require more explicit communication of objectives, expectations and approaches.
• Leading from behind might require humility and willingness to learn from others, modeling the importance of collaboration and teamwork regardless of role or rank.
Foster positive team habits.
Good leaders also work on team habits and dynamics and create a system that works best for everyone. Ineffective systems hamper good people all the time. In my experience, most people want to do a good job; it’s their systems, structures and habits that limit them. This is why, instead of performance managing individuals, the best way to change the effectiveness of a team is to change their team habits.
My book Team Habits references this same idea in its title and elaborates on all the ways in which we work together in our organizations. I identified eight categories of team habits that govern much of the way teams work together: belonging, decision-making, goal-setting and prioritization, planning, communication, collaboration, meetings and core team habits. These team habits refer to the individual skills we must master to work together as a team, such as showing our work, planning our capacity and so on.
I was talking to a colleague involved in organizational change management recently. We discussed how much organizational structure determines people’s work dynamics and how organizational structure encourages certain team habits. Most people aren’t in a position to directly change their organization’s structure. They can only change their own habits and perhaps influence the team habits with the four to eight people they work with daily.
As a leader working to create good team habits, successful dynamics and improved effectiveness, consider these two questions:
1. What’s the friction that’s keeping my team from excelling? And how do I remove that friction?
2. How am I participating in the very behaviors and individual outcomes I don’t want the team to do?
Answering those two questions sets the stage for your team to do great work.
Aside from the outliers on either end of the spectrum of teammate experience, I believe most of us, maybe 80%, are in the middle, fumbling and trying to do the best we can to figure out how to make work better. I find most teams are like that; they have good people doing the best they can in the system that may or may not be working for them. Approaching leadership in terms of system and structure and habit changes, instead of people changes, gives you a different axis from which to create solutions.
Rather than looking at how X manager can change Y employee’s performance, other solutions arise. Instead, it might be, “How can X create an environment where Y can be the best version of Y and do what Y wants to do in this team?” People tend to resist change, especially when they feel that change is being forced upon them. But creating an environment where teammates can be catalysts for changes in their zones of influence makes those changes easier on the teammates and more effective in the long term.
Some people respond to this idea by saying, “Well, that doesn’t scale. You can’t do that for an entire organization.” That’s why I encourage leaders, teammates and individuals to focus not on the entire organization, but on the four to eight people you work with 80% of the time. You can learn those people well enough, it turns out, to understand what makes them tick. And together you can all use that understanding to create an environment where positive habit change is possible.
So what’s the link between leadership and productivity? Good leaders create an environment that enables teams to be more productive and higher performing. And great leaders create other leaders who can do the same.
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