3 Ways to Help Your Team Deliver Their Work

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

One of the four major activities that will consume your leadership capital is helping your team deliver their work. A leader’s role in delivering the work requires them to monitor progress, correct work that needs fixed, and repair work that was done incorrectly. Consider these approaches to ensure your team is delivering the work.

Monitoring Work

In terms of monitoring, it should be goal focused. Your monitoring should be by exception, and hopefully when you’re doing monitoring, it should be confidence building for the members of your team. Monitoring should not be tasked focused at the individual task level. It shouldn’t be a total review of all the tasks your team members are working on. And hopefully, your monitoring is not stress-inducing for the members of the team.

Correcting Work

Correcting activities should be occasional. You should be dealing with first-time mistakes. You should be the final check on the deliverable. Correcting should not be every day. You shouldn’t be correcting the same mistakes over and over, and you definitely should not be the first check of your team member’s work. They should be doing that themselves.

Repairing Work

In terms of repairing, hopefully it’s infrequent. The repairs are done at a small-scale and your team members should be alerting you to the need to repair something. Repairing should not be frequent. It shouldn’t be large-scale issues that you’re trying to fix, and your team members should not be hiding those issues from you.

I know one leader who wasn’t doing monitoring well. He had a total review of all the tasks in his division. He used to have a 10-hour long monthly meeting with all of his direct reports. In that meeting, every single direct report went through every task they were working on. And this leader dug into every task, trying to monitor their activity on all of them. Eventually, the team got so frustrated with this approach that they left. Many of them sought jobs in other divisions or even other companies. His monitoring activities were not calibrated to the level he should have been operating at.

Delivering the work is about ensuring your team is doing high quality work that meets the commitments you’ve set out with your stakeholders.

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