The Real Problem With Your Team Might Be You

Are you tired of your team members not performing well and driving you crazy?  There’s a fix for that. It begins with realizing it’s probably all your fault…

All too often we blame performance issues on our team members.  After all, they’re the ones driving us crazy.

But that’s not fair. Leaders need to understand that they’re driving that poor performance in some way.

In our new book Lead Inside the Box: How Smart Leaders Guide Their Teams to Exceptional Results (CLICK HERE to get your copy), we share the following perspectives. Here’s an excerpt to help you tackle this awareness issue.

For some newly-minted leaders, making the shift from delivering the work to working through others to deliver results feels like they’ve gone from pulling all the strings to pushing a rope. If they can’t get their team members to do the job exactly the way they would do it, they may be tempted to micromanage or, even worse, do the work themselves.

But now that they have more that they’re responsible for, they can’t do it all. If they take that approach, they’ll burn themselves out and fail to deliver the results they desire and the organization expects. Your scarcest resource is the time and energy available for you to invest in leading your team – your leadership capital. To get the most out of your team without burning yourself out, invest your leadership capital wisely. To do so, figure out where to invest it in your team members to achieve the greatest results for your efforts.

Different types of team members require different amounts and types of leadership capital from you.

Being a smart leader means you proactively figure out how to invest your leadership capital instead of dedicating it to the most pressing performance issue or crisis.

When we face a crisis, we tend to react first and think later. While doing so might solve the immediate problem, reacting that way could cause dysfunctional behaviors to arise in your team members. If you behave this way often enough, you might become an enabler of bad behavior. Rather than solving problems themselves, your team members will come to you to resolve the issue. Their demands will then take up all your time and energy.Why would they solve the difficult issues themselves when they can pass them off to you instead? They’ll do this because this approach makes their lives easier.

Avoid the mistake of always leading your team members exactly how they ask to be led. There are occasions you’ll need to lead them much differently than they might desire. Don’t let them dictate how you spend your leadership capital. It’s your job to determine where you focus your energies.

Another common leadership capital allocation error to avoid is spreading your time and energy evenly across all your team members. Some people need a great deal of your attention. Others perform better if you leave them alone the majority of the time. Knowing the difference and acting accordingly requires effort on your part, but it’s worth figuring out. Be thoughtful about how you allocate your efforts rather than being lazy and doing what others ask you to do or parceling out your energy equally to everyone because that’s a “fair” way to do it.

How do you determine how to invest your leadership capital? The same way you would look at any other investment – how much output do you get and how much input does it take to get it? You can review your team members this way too. Assess how much output you get – the quality and quantity of their results – from the input they require from you – your leadership capital. Plotting those two “metrics” relative to one another creates a 2×2 matrix of four boxes that describe different types of team member behaviors. It’s called the Leadership Matrix.

Your team is a portfolio of team members distributed across these different behavior types. More often than not, you’ll find your team members are scattered across multiple boxes. Regardless of where they plot initially, remember their position isn’t fixed. As you lead them to improved performance, they’ll change positions on the matrix.

For starters, get a complete assessment of your team’s distribution on the matrix. This view of your team is valuable because some boxes in your portfolio are much more efficient than others. This initial assessment indicates where to focus your efforts to improve their performance.

If you can develop your team members such that they move to the more efficient boxes, you improve your team’s efficiency. That should make everyone – you, your team, and your bosses – happier and will mark you as an effective leader.

Not only that – your personal stress levels will decrease as a result. Your improved results will require less time and effort from you to achieve. That will free up your time and energy for other pursuits like vacation, family time, and your own professional development. Building a team of high performers provides benefits well beyond delivering great results.

By changing your behaviors and approaches to your team members, you might just unlock those wonderful results you’ve been searching for.

For an in-depth look at the Leadership Matrix, pick up a copy of the book (CLICK HERE to get your copy now) and check out the book’s website. We have a nifty assessment tool there where you can answer a few simple questions about your team members and get clear recommendations on how to lead them more effectively.

In addition to the book, classroom instruction and keynote presentations on the Lead Inside the Box method are available.  Please contact us to arrange for this course to be trained at your organization or to have us come deliver a keynote presentation on the topic at your next event.

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

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