My tips on how to be a leader and get results

Introduction

Over the past 3 weeks, I have been posting about leadership tips and now I decided to compile all of them in one article on LinkedIn, so with no more preamble, here is my list of the top 15 tips on how I lead high-performance teams:

▶️ Hire the Right People

▶️ Define Clear Goals and Expectations

▶️ Create a Culture of Trust

▶️ Provide Resources and Support

▶️ Foster Collaboration

▶️ Celebrate Successes

▶️ Communicate Effectively

▶️ Empower Your Team

▶️ Set Realistic Deadlines

▶️ Provide Constructive Feedback

▶️ Manage Conflict

▶️ Lead by Example

▶️ Emphasize Work-Life Balance

▶️ Focus on Continuous Improvement

▶️ Celebrate Diversity and Inclusion

Over the next lines, I will expand each of the topics, feel free to jump and go directly to the one that is most interesting to you.

Hiring the right people

What I have learned over the years is that the perfect candidate does not exist, and your job as a leader is to work hard to transform a potential candidate into a rock star.

Start by creating a clear and compelling job description that shows what you expect from the role, what is in for the successful candidate, and how you are going to compensate them for their work.

Learn from how successful companies do their recruiting practices, and I advise you that you at least have a look at the book work rules by Laszlo Bock or No Rules Rules by Reed Hastings to have an idea of best practices.

In my experience, also hire for attitude and then train for technical skills, but attitude is key when you want someone from your team.

My last piece of advice will be, to hire people that are brighter than you, it will help the team, and it will challenge you to learn and adapt.

Happy hiring!

Define Clear Goals and Expectations

Every role you hire for your team should have clear goals defined. This helps to bring focus and clear direction for the people.

Use the SMART framework when setting up goals, that means that goals must be: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bounded.

But be aware that you need to differentiate on the nature that the role does, putting an operational goal to a team that manages projects or vice versa will not help.

Another good thing that I have learned over the years is that you should socialize the goals with your team members to get feedback and adapt. This will guarantee that they feel part of the goal-setting process and not just that they were mandated to comply with them. It will also show that you trust your team and their judgment, at the end, if you have hired them, why you should not right?

Listen to everyone when establishing goals, the final decision is probably yours, but you will be more effective if you just put every brain in the game!

Create a Culture of Trust

Oh, trust…

So talked about, but yet not so practised in some places.

You have hired the right people, and set clear goals and expectations, so please try to explain to me, why you should not trust them to do the right thing all the time.

Your job as a leader is to guide your team, not to do their work. Your job is to lay down the playing field and the rules, and then trust in them, so they can perform at their best.

Micromanagers or “leaders” obsessed with control mechanisms pave the road for a toxic environment that will not attract talent.

Beware that you also should have the fortitude to act when someone from your team breaks that trust or cross the lines of respect with you or someone else on the team. If that happens, you need to take action, give feedback, reinforce the reasons you operate that way, and monitor that the person reflects and behaves as expected.

Ahh, and trust is also relevant when your team makes mistakes or fails, be there when this happens, take ownership and help them fix it, and sit with them to openly discuss the lessons learned. Prove that you respect them and that you are a leader not only to celebrate but also when things are not going the way everyone expects.

If the trust is lost, there is no team, no goals, and no Rock stars!

Provide Resources and Support

Your job as a leader is to provide all the resources and remove all the blockages that your team needs to excel.

Your job as a leader is to have difficult conversations with your peers and stakeholders and reach agreements, so your team can move forward.

Your job as a leader is to make sure that their laptops work, the materials they need to do the job are there, that their uniforms (if that is the case) are available, and that their environment is safe.

Your job as a leader is to provide emotional support when some of your team members are having rough times at home, school, or life in general.

Your job as a leader is to make sure that your team members have a healthy work-life balance.

Some people say that these are not tasks of a leader but of a manager, guess what, management is also part of the leader's job description. So please make sure that you also care about this, because it will make your team’s life much, much easier.

Foster Collaboration

If you really want to create a team, then collaboration is a must. I like a phrase from the former Jack Welch that states that in a venture, you should have every brain in the game.

What this means is that in a team, everyone should have a voice and that voice needs to be heard and respected, your job as a leader is exactly that, making sure that every voice is heard.

The 8th waste of #leanthinking is unused talent, and the worst it can happen to your team is when one, or several, of the team members remain silent.

But how do you encourage this to happen? For me, you need to seize any meeting or interaction to ask directly for opinions or leave your doors open for most introverted team members that just want to air their concerns just to you and not in public.

One simple trick that I use to involve everyone is that in every brainstorming or problem-solving session, the first exercise is individual, just allow 10 to 15 minutes when everyone should write their thoughts and ideas in post-its in silence, just on their own before they start sharing. This helps to build confidence in the quietest members and reduce the protagonism in the loudest ones.

Then, just ask that everyone reads out loud their ideas one at a time and take turns in a round. This guarantee that everyone can express themselves safely and the rest of the team needs to listen.

And how about you? How do you foster collaboration in your teams?

Celebrate Successes

This is a tricky one for me, and I will lie if I told you that I am good at celebrating successes. One of my defects is that I put high standards for myself and my team, so when I achieve something I just see it as part of the job and sometimes, more often than not, I forgot to celebrate achievements.

Nevertheless, I recognize the importance of celebration when leading teams, and I am not saying that I do not celebrate with my team members, I am just saying that I should celebrate more and more often.

Small milestones must be celebrated, big milestones must be celebrated, heck, all milestones should be celebrated, and I have made a promise to myself to improve in this aspect of my leadership style.

Because, when I go out with my team members to enjoy food or drinks and forget about the hassle of work, it really feels good. Seeing them laughing and just being themselves without the pressure to perform is gratifying.

So go out and celebrate! It is totally worth it.

Communicate Effectively

You are not a leader if you can communicate at all levels of the organization. ALL, not just your upper management, ALL, from the frontline to the top. Please, let me be emphatic: ALL!!

I consider effective communication to be one of the top 3 skills that I need in my team and have written an article about some tips to improve your communication skills, which I encourage you to go and read in this link.

As a joke, with a previous boss of mine, we declared that we need in our team people that think and express themselves in bullet points, this was just to refer, that we appreciate people that have the skill to process, digest and express their ideas with simple phrases regardless of the medium (mail, conversation, document, video, etc).

My last thought on this is that you also make sure to be inclusive in the way you communicate, but being inclusive does not mean distorting the language as some people think, it means that you select the correct medium, so your message can reach people with different abilities and make sure that you use as many channels as possible to reach your audience.

Empower Your Team

According to the Oxford Dictionary, empowerment refers to the authority or power given to someone to do something.

Some managers are afraid of this so much that they just get involved in every single aspect or decision their team needs to make, crippling the ability of the team to perform, progress, and achieve.

I truly believe that my role, as a leader, is to empower people, so they can outperform me. Be there when they fail, pick them up, and let them feel proud when they succeed.

In every interview for a new role that I have, when discussing what is my plan for the team, I always repeat the same: I will work as hard as I can, so my team does not need me, and when that happens, it is time to find another challenge for me.

I have an easy trick to make people feel empowered, when they approach me with a decision to make, I sometimes say: I don’t know. If you were me, what do you think I should do? 🤷🏼 ♂️ The people just come up immediately with solutions and I simply respond with an: If it is OK with you, then it is OK for me.

This can sound aggressive, and it maybe makes you believe that I do not care, but it works wonders because people feel that they are in charge, that for a minute, they are the boss, and it gives them confidence. I do care about the end result, but I care more about people's development when they are on my team.

Empowerment plays a vital role in that mindset, if you do not let them do, let them be, let them think, let them fail, let them learn, you are not a leader, you are just guiding a herd. I assure you, you will learn a lot along the way.

So, go, let your ego go away, and delegate your precious authority. You will thank me later.

Set Realistic Deadlines

There are a lot of techniques coming from Agile methodologies to try to come up with realistic deadlines for different tasks or projects. In my experience, the best way to come up with realistic deadlines is to let your team decide and commit to the deadlines.

You need to constantly reinforce, to your team, that you trust their judgment and that you will do your best to remove the obstacles along the way.

However, you will also face pressure from your stakeholders to have everything ready at the same time, so your ability to prioritize, reallocate resources, and negotiate with your stakeholders comes into play.

When your team commitment, is not aligned with what your customer, internal or external, is demanding, have an honest conversation with your team and ask just a simple question: Guys, we are not meeting our customer needs, How we can make this happen, and what support you need from me to make it happen?

I am sure that if you read the previous topics, and you applied some of the tips, by now, your team will follow and make it happen.

Provide Constructive Feedback

Feedback is essential to learn and grow as a team. And feedback goes both ways, not just one. That means that you as the team leader need to be willing to listen to your team's feedback. If you develop trust and relations correctly, this does not need to be a difficult-to-grasp experience, in fact, it should be a fun one and both parties should take it as a learning experience.

But besides the advice to be open to receiving feedback your job as a leader is also to give feedback, and I am not referring to the one that most companies do every year in their performance appraisal. I am referring to “online” feedback, feedback that is given immediately after a behaviour has been noted, positive or negative, it does not matter, but it should be immediate.

Did one of your team members rock the presentation? Give them immediate positive feedback and praise them for their performance. It happened completely the opposite, sit with them and ask them to reflect and take the lessons learned.

Right there, as soon as you finished, “online”.

If you do it this way, yearly performance appraisals will not be a surprise for anyone.

Ahh, and don’t forget, leave emotions aside and do not make this personal, keep it simple, keep it to the point, keep it professional, remember that you are there to help them grow and develop their career, and feedback is an important part of the learning journey of every person.

Manage Conflict

Conflict will be present, conflict will happen eventually, and conflict will come for several different reasons. A deadline not met, a performance appraisal not well received, a teammate not willing to collaborate, a rude stakeholder, and so on.

I have been in environments where some of the “leaders” push the team to be in constant conflict mode and believe me, I did not enjoy a single bit of it.

Conflict drains you emotionally and mentally, and you, as a leader, must be prepared for this.

But first, please do not confuse, disagreement with the facts, or the roadmap with conflict. This is not conflict, it is just people with different opinions on how to reach a goal.

So, how do I deal with conflict inside my teams? I just give them a knife and put them in a locked room. 🤪

Jokes aside, here is what I do: (1) sit with each part individually and listen to their part of the story, (2) ask them questions about how they think the other people see the problem, (3) ask them about what they are willing to compromise to reach an agreement, and (4) sit all together and act as mediator or facilitator.

No backstabbing, no taking sides, direct and honest talk with each conflicting part individually, and when things are calmed down, with all of us as a group.

This has helped me, but I am not an expert, and as I told you, I do not enjoy conflict so please, let me know what you think in the comments.

Lead by Example

Do what you said you were going to do in the form and time you said you were going to do it. Walk the talk, simple as that.

Sounds easy right? Well, the world is full of examples of leaders that just change their minds and their actions like they are changing clothes. My intention is not to get political about it, but each one of you can relate to a leader that you follow or admire, and correct me if I am wrong, but it is probably because he talks and behaves in a way that resonates with you. At least that is what happens to me.

When you are a leader for your team, you need to put your act together and make sure that if you promise something, you deliver, not only for your team but for your organization as well. If you are able to pull this off, you will gain credibility and trust, and things will start to go smoothly for you.

Also, remember to be consistent in time with this behaviour because trust and credibility can be gained or lost quickly.

I do not have a tip on how to do this but trust me when I say that your team will follow and remember you constantly on what you did or said.

Emphasize Work-Life Balance

Not everything in life is work. People have families, people have accidents, people get sick, people lost pets, people lost family and close friends, and people wake up on the wrong foot. People are people, complex human bodies and minds.

You are also part of humanity, so the best way to emphasize work-life balance for your team is to act as a human.

If the guy that is always cheerful and making jokes for the rest of the team is suddenly quiet and introverted, you should approach them and try to find out what is happening.

If your rock star suddenly becomes a normal performer, you should approach him/her and find out what is happening.

Being able to detect changes in normal behaviour is an alert sign that maybe something is bothering them, and your job as a leader is to listen and try to help in any way you can. The deadline for a task will never be as important as a family, close friend, or pet getting ill.

Also encourage your team to close their laptops on time and go home, to have a holiday, to take days or hours off from the screens or workplace if they are feeling stressed or burnout. And this is a good action point for you to lead by example, take your holidays, take some days off when you are feeling stressed, leave on time, and respect their time at home. Act as a human being.

Focus on Continuous Improvement

Needless to say that I am a huge fan of continuous improvement, but my intention here is not to write extensively about this topic. Remember that a team is just as strong as the weakest part of it.

So, how do I think that continuous improvement can be done in a team? Well, for me, it is a matter of improving the skills of the team members and for that, I advise that you:

1. List and agree to the skills needed in your team, keep it simple, between 5 and 7
2. Create a simple scale for evaluation, ranging from: cannot do the work by their own to is able to teach others
3. Ask everyone to self-evaluate using the skills and the scale
4. Do your calibration, this can be done by you or by the team, prefer the latest
5. Put together an improvement plan for the skills
6. Involve the most skilled team members in the success of the least skilled ones
7. Revisit points 1 to 6 at least every six months and adjust as needed.

If you focus on improving the skills of your team, continuous improvement will come naturally.

Celebrate Diversity and Inclusion

Diversity and inclusion bring joy and excitement to a team. People from different backgrounds, races, nationalities, sexual orientations, ages, etc can help a team to come up with more and better ideas and solutions.

I have to admit that I am not an expert in this topic, and when you end up leading a team in a company, the policies in place of that company most probably will determine your team composition.

My only advice in this aspect is that when you want to hire or brought someone to your team, ask HR to not discriminate against anyone and evaluate objectively every single candidate. Easier said than done.

One easy, simple thing that you can do when forming a team, is simply introduce parity criteria to it. This is simple, actionable, and mostly under your control.

This alone does not guarantee diversity and inclusion, but at least you are taking some action.

And as I told you in my post about communication, you need to adapt, be flexible, and put the mechanisms in place so everyone feels welcomed and safe in your team.

Closing words

That was it for this article. I hope you have enjoyed my reflections on leading teams during the last 20 years of my life.

I just want to close with a simple phrase that someone on my first team told me and that up to now, still resonates with me: Make sure you treat people with respect on your way to the top because they will hold you or let you fall if you are coming down.

And that simple principle is the one that I have been applying my whole life as a team leader.

#leadership #humanresources #managementconsulting #team #talentdevelopment