Archives For Teamwork

here The Presence | Leading A Frustrated Team [Part 4]

Leaders are most needed in chaos and uncertainty. Leadership is always about orchestrating a better future. This does not only apply to the enterprise they lead, or the cause they champion. This starts with their team.

The ultimate purpose of leadership is warding of darkness and chaos. For them to effectively do that, the vehicle through which they accomplish this must be without darkness or chaos. This vehicle is the enterprise and or its teams.

An organization or team without a leader will come apart at the seams, allowing the darkness or problem they were supposed to solve to prevail.

Here

The presence of leaders is most critical in times of turmoil and uncertainty. Leaders are there to point the way. You cannot team will flounder in your absence.

The presence of the leader is critical when a team is frustrated. When your team is frustrated that is when you need to be most accessible. Frustration makes teams vulnerable. When anything is at its vulnerable state it needs a little more attention and care.

When your team is frustration don’t go AWOL. There are two kinds of leaders’ absence that will destroy teams, robbing their cause of champions.

Not Here

The physical presence of a leader is important. Your team must have contact with you. Your visibility is important. Delegation / giving responsibility to your team allows your team to focus on what they are best at. It also trains leaders to lead. However, giving responsibility doesn’t mean abandonment.

Related: Why Leaders Should Spend Time In The Trenches With Technical Teams

Leaders’ visibility inspires. A real or good ol’ pat-on-the-back, literally, still means a lot. When leading a frustrated team remember to be visible and do all you can to be physically present and visible.

Here-Not-Here

There’s a subtle absence that leaders overlook when their teams are struggling. This is the present yet absent leaders. The leaders is physically present but he’s elsewhere. Parking your body and teleporting elsewhere does not solve your teams’ challenges nor ease their pressure.

Leader, be present. Be there. Focused. Attentive. Listen and listen intently. Your presence means nothing if it is only physical. It is also useless if you’re not exploring solutions with your team. It is pointless if you’re ignoring the frustration and its cause.

Be present. Miss nothing. The leader’s presence must be unmistakable and tower over the frustration. That you are concerned and acting against frustration allows your team to focus on what they should be and not the frustration or its cause.

Leader, I’ll say it again be present. Many problems and altercations can easily be overcome and avoided when leaders are present. Really present. Leader, be present. Really present.

This is part 4 of the series on Leading A Frustrated Team. If you haven’t already, check out:

Cool | Leading A Frustrated Team [Part 3]
Hear | Leading a Frustrated Team [Part 2]
Ignore? | Leading a Frustrated Team [Part 1]

image credit:  katerha | cc

Posted on 03/05/2013 In Leadership, Teamwork
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Cool | Leading A Frustrated Team [Part 3]

01/05/2013 — Leave a comment

This is part three of in the series on Leading Frustrated Teams. Check out the second post here.

Teams get their cue from their leaders. Those following you see you as the mold they need to fit into. Those you serve, as a leader, learn to celebrate your enterprises’ wins from you. They learn to take the hits from how well you do it.

When you and your team are frustrated it is critical what you do. The response of your leadership to challenges becomes the response of the team.

calm Cool | Leading A Frustrated Team [Part 3]

calm from leaders is what frustrated teams need

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Burst

When you team is frustrated, regardless of the source of their frustration, you mustn’t lose your cool.

When everyone is freaking out the last thing a leader should do is join them. You cannot act rationally if you join the madness.

When teams, or anyone, is frustrated, they hardly act in a rational way. Before you can bring your team back into the game, you need to address their frustration.

Losing your temper on your team is never in the top ten list of getting rid of your team’s frustration

Dear leader, keep your cool. When you burst out in tantrums with your frustrated team as the audience, you push them further into it. Leaders with temper problems are not healthy for themselves and those they lead.

Panic

Panic is just as bad as temper tantrums. Panic is a result of magnifying your inadequacy and not the importance of your vision. Your anchor, as a leader and team, must always be why you must do what you do and not how obstacles inhibit you.

You may be in a state of panic but you must contain it and avoid further infecting your team. Keep calm and just lead. If you’re going to freak out do so with a trusted mentor and get back to your team composed.

The first step to thinking clearly is composing yourself. Leading your team in and through frustration, has to include bringing them to a state of composure or calm.

Cool

One of the most empowering things a frustrated team needs is a leader with composure. The composure of the leader is empowering. It gives courage in the seemingly hopeless moments. It communicates that it is possible to function and deliver even in the most adverse conditions.

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Hear | Leading a Frustrated Team [Part 2]

30/04/2013 — 2 Comments

This is the second post in the series on Leading Frustrated Teams. Check out the first post here.

Ignoring your team’s frustration will more than hurt your team’s morale but the pursuit of your cause. In an earlier post in this series, I covered the problem of ignoring your teams’ frustration.

You cannot solve what you do not understand. You may never fully understand some challenges or their causes. However, the more you understand a challenge or reasons for some obstacles the better at solving them you will be.

Never start hatching a plan to solve a problem until you’ve made effort to understand it and its cause.

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dialogue is often overlooked in leading frustrated teams

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Vent

After acknowledging your team’s frustration you need to hear them out. Create a platform for them to vent their frustration. Don’t try to ‘workshop’ problems at this stage. Don’t start working on a solution until they have vented their frustration.

Giving your team space to vent their frustration is part of solving the reason for their frustration.

Many leaders just want to wave a wand and voila! = Frustration gone. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.

Sometimes people feel better about a problem not because they’ve found a solution but because they’ve said what is bothering them.

Never mistake your team venting frustration as a direct attack on you

It is wisest to have your team vent with you, as the leader, than with someone from the outside. Worse still if some, not all, your team members are frustrated and they continually vent with other team members it can breed anarchy.

Thus the safest environment for your team to vent is directly to you.

Dialogue

 

After the venting is out of the way, the next step is to talk with and not at your team. Listen more than you talk. Get their perspective on how they arrived at their frustration. If it is a result you failing them, own your failure.

Show them how to take responsibility for their failure by taking responsibility for yours.

Ask your team what they feel would correct their frustration. In your dialogue make sure you leave with the next practical step to resolving frustration.

Escalation

Frustration escalates when leaders are not willing to really dialogue, beyond a superficial level. Not listening to your team only makes things worse. Lead well.  Don’t be that leader who feels only they can be frustrated and their team is immune to frustration.

You can actually solve frustration by simply talking ;-)

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Ignore? | Leading a Frustrated Team [Part 1]

29/04/2013 — 3 Comments

This is the first post in the series on Leading Frustrated Teams. 

Leaders are often a frustrated bunch. This can be due to the intensity of some things that cannot be separated from leading. Everyone seems to look to leadership for answers. Every problem is ultimately the leaders’ problem. Leadership is not for sissies.

However, leaders must not get so entangled in their own frustration that they do not realize the frustration of their teams. Sometimes leaders are the source of their teams’ frustration.

Related Post: More Than 5 Reasons Your Teams Is Frustrated With Your Leadership

Despite the source of the team’s frustration, they still do need to lead. Every leader, at one point or another, will need to lead a frustrated team.

frustrated team Ignore? | Leading a Frustrated Team [Part 1]

frustration inhibits your team’s growth and performance, if you ignore it

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How to lead a frustrated team:

Ignore?

One of the worst mistakes any leader must never make is ignoring the frustration of his team. At some point we’ve all been led by a leader with the audacity to ask you to deliver, while turning a blind eye to obstacles he needs to address. Some of those obstacles being overwhelmed and frustrated.

When you lead a frustrated team, do not ignore their frustration. Address it head-on. Getting to the bottom of it now and not later means you deal with molehills before they become mountains.

Not every problem is solved by being ignored.

Ignoring the frustration of your team is creating an incubator for it. Thus, creating a great environment for frustration to grow.

Which?

Great leaders know that they must ignore some things to pay attention to others. Balance is a myth. Some things deserve greater attention than others.

How you determine which things to pay attention to must be clear to you and your team. Always be clear with your team which things are priority. One of the reasons for conflict between teams and leaders is the conflict of priority and interests.

Every leader must make sure that they build into their culture filtering mechanisms of what comes first. When values are shared and the same worth is placed on the same values, conflict is minimal.

Acknowledge

When they are frustrated don’t act like they are not. Acknowledge the frustration. That is the first place to stand. Turning a blind eye can lead to even greater frustration.

In acknowledging their frustration make a commitment to resolving their frustration. State at least one practical step that can be immediately taken to combat the frustration.

Leaders and organizations that bury their heads in the sand in the face of frustration will soon meet their demise. Don’t ignore your teams’ frustration till it gets so big you can’t ignore it and it is more difficult to address. Lead well. Don’t ignore your teams’ concerns and frustration.

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An Overlooked Quality In Identifying Exceptional Leaders

23/04/2013 — 1 Comment 
This is a guest post by Michael Mpofu. Michael is a Research and Communications Officer. A great young 
leader and communicator passionate about inspiring others to great leadership and significance. He blogs (less than he should) here.

I’ve had the privilege of being part of something greater than me. An opportunity to play whatever leadership role I have been asked to… I’ve learnt a valuable lesson:

Simply that some of our best leaders are not always the most talented, but the most committed.

I’ve also been fortunate enough to sit around tables with some brilliant leaders, and can say that the mark of their great leadership was evident not on their abilities (which were exceptional), but their commitment.

The trouble, I think, is that we too easily assume that the one with the gift is the one poised for leadership, heir to the throne, or however you would put it. But his / her gift is worth nothing if they aren’t committed to the vision. This might seem rather obvious, but very often, the opposite happens.

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commitment is often undermined when talent is the only thing considered in appointing leaders  || image by tdm911 | cc

We often look around for the gifted one among us to do the job but overlook the person who has been there from the beginning. Don’t get me wrong; one has to be adding value to the team.

So the question is how do we “test” commitment?

The answer is simple: we don’t, people often do it for you. They test themselves.

In observing those that have gone before me and are farther ahead on the road, I’ve learnt that time will separated the committed, from the non-committed.

This will then help you lay the foundation and give you the best opportunity to invest in those that have chosen to attend those meetings, go the extra mile, send those emails or pick up whatever needs to be fetched.

Time separates groups and categories of people well.

It is often from those who have stuck it out, that your best leaders emerge, because you don’t have to teach them anything about the need for commitment, they already have it. And it is often that your most committed are the ones most willing to learn.

Am I saying we don’t have a responsibility to inspire people to that place? Absolutely not!

But I am saying that after you have tried your level best to do so, the choice is often the individual’s to make.

Some of the greatest “would have been” leaders are on the sidelines because they simply failed to show commitment.

For example, you can fault a bad basketball team full of “stars”, the best players in the land, that DOESN’T train and loses!

But you cannot fault a team, with average players, but puts in the yards, and while it may lose, they have shown their heart.

The trouble is we only realize it after some time that perhaps they weren’t the most obvious choice because of their gift.

So perhaps next time when looking for your “go-to” man / woman, keep it in mind, that time will separate the gifted from the committed, then only can you begin to build something significant.

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