3 Ways You Can Help Your Team Do Their Work

Keep these three leadership roles in mind when helping your team members complete their work.

One of the four major activities that will consume your leadership capital is helping your team do their work. You should make decisions, motivate them and help them overcome obstacles:

Making Decisions

In terms of deciding, you should be making decisions that are beyond their authority. You should be reviewing their plans and pressure-testing the decisions they make. Deciding should not be making decisions that are within their authority. You shouldn’t be making their plans for them and it’s definitely not about them offloading accountability for decisions to you.

Motivating

Motivating should be occasional. It should be about helping your team overcome new challenges. You should be setting aspirations for them. Motivating should not be every day. You shouldn’t have to motivate them in terms of routine activities and motivating definitely is not about invoking fear.

Clearing Obstacles

Clearing activities are helping them deal with issues above their level. You’re going to help them overcome new or tough barriers. Clearing is not about helping mediate conflict with their peers or helping them overcome routine barriers.

I have one client I work with as an executive coach and he was having some problems with deciding. When we sat down and talked about the decisions he was making, he felt great about it. When we dug into it, what we learned was most of the decisions he was making were ones that were definitely within the authority of his team. His team members were coming to him and saying, “Hey, here’s a decision. How about you make it for me?” Now, my client felt great because he felt important, he felt needed and he felt like he was making great decisions. On reflection, he was doing work that should have been done by the members of his team. We had to reassess how he was going to engage with his team members on deciding activities.

Remember, doing doesn’t mean you’re actually doing the work. Your job is to ensure the team members are able to get their work done.

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