3 Leadership Sins DESTROYING Your Team's Productivity (and How to Fix Them)
Due to workplace politics, your team can't give you feedback on some things.
Most often, it's because they fear getting in trouble or because they can't truly articulate the root of the problem.
But if you're doing any of these 3 things, you're going to break trust with your team and push away any A-players you've brought on.
1. (Publicly) re-assigning when something isn't getting done, and without a conversation
People who you've brought on to your team in a more regular capacity than a one-off contractor likely take a lot of pride in their work.
They're also empowered to do their best work when they receive crystal clear leadership and participation.
When you re-assign, especially publicly, you take away the opportunity for that team member to shine.
And when you re-assigned in front of the team by saying something like, "Oh. I reassigned to @nathan because I needed it done more quickly." - It demonstrates that you don't trust that team member.
If something isn't getting done, firstly, take responsibility for the absolute clarity with which you did or did not assign the task.
Did you set clear deadlines? Did you communicate new deadlines? Are the most up-to-date deadlines reflected in a central, dynamic project management system?
If not, there is where you need to work. And hiring more or new team members will not solve your personal leadership problem.
2. "Double assigning"
Have you ever been part of a team or been a team lead and seen a message like this come across?
"@john @mark Can you please check in on this?"
This is a horrible message to send OR receive because:
a) Who specifically are you assigning this to? Who specifically is in charge of making or reporting changes if things are not in order? You are wasting horsepower when you assign like this.
b) "This" is non-specific. It forces the receiver to assume the assignment.
In the words of Alex Charfen, "Leadership is repetition."
I'll say that again. As a leader, get used to repeating stuff a LOT.
If you're frustrated with your team, take an honest look at how exactly you are assigning them.
Bordering on being overly detailed, ALL THE TIME, pays in spades.
As a leader, you MUST shift that spending 30 minutes to assign someone a 60 minute task is a good use of your time.
Over time, you'll likely get much faster at assigning too. ;-)
3. Breaking communication boundaries when something isn't getting done, especially when clear timelines are not assigned.
One of the problems most freelancers and creative people face is having clear boundaries around when their work starts and stops.
Contacting them outside of their work hours, especially if they have disclosed their work hours to you, especially on platforms not dedicated for work communications (i.e. texting) breaks trust and breaks focus.
Broken trust with respect to work communication boundaries will quickly fray working relationships because it disempowers people to tap into subconscious creativity that comes from the play time outside of working hours.
And broken focus costs you and typically results in lower quality work.
With broken trust and broken focus, the predictable outcome is work that has a higher social relationship cost and a higher cost in terms of hours.
In my experience, most leaders have relatively poor skills for determining what is actually "urgent".
The vast majority of other cases can be cleared up with a simple, "Hey, I'll get this over to my team in the morning."
You'll find that when you protect your team's boundaries while also demonstrating care for the customer, even if you aren't fixing the problem that instant, people respect you and the boundaries you place on your time even more.
How to fix these leadership sins:
1. Get a central project management hub like Trello or Asana
If your business does not have a central project management hub to reflect project changes outside of a Slack channel (where everything gets buried), I can guarantee people will be missing crucial project details.
Take responsibility as a leader to learn how to interact with the basics of your project management system.
If you don't want to touch the system, adopt the practice of only assigning tasks (which then get loaded into the system) via your project manager.
2. Get a dedicated channel for work communications
Dedicated communication channels are a wonderful tool for regular team members but is typically a poor tool for outside contractors.
As a rule of thumb:
Regular, full-time team members in dedicated channels
Outside contractors via email
Growing your business isn't always about the fanciest new YouTube strategy, or starting a Facebook group, or running ads...
It's about greasing ALL of the gears and the main gear being yourself and how YOU consciously interact with your business. This is not a problem that is fixed by hiring new people. It absolutely must be addressed by how you as the leader choose to assign tasks and/or funnel your creativity.
Want help?
For the people who install this approach in their business, you can look forward to experiencing lower stress and overwhelm, reduced time IN your business, and a wild increase in productivity.
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