#2 Movating People as a Leader - The What

I am currently reading a fascinating book called Reality-Based Leadership by Cy Wakeman.  This book has been a great tool to validate some of the key team empowerment and morale barriers, blunders, and behaviors that I have experienced in my career.

Think about  this statistic from a Gallup poll mentioned in the book.  71 percent of employees are disengaged to the point that they consider quitting their jobs about once a day.  So, how do you successfully lead a team in this environment?

In my experience, leaders today in the corporate environment spend more time talking to each other instead of talking to the people who are doing the work.  Leaders are forced to focus on how things need to be done instead of defining what needs to be done.  Leaders no longer lead; they manage day to day details and question decisions made by teams instead of letting those that were hired to do the job, do the job. 

Leaders must be able to communicate the vision and have a strong enough action plan to give the team the needed steps and path to make the vision happen.  The more time leaders spend managing instead of leading, the more it will result in disgruntled employees who feel they are not empowered or accountable for their own jobs and roles in making a difference by doing their jobs.

A good leader's job is to know and set the vision and then communicate and lead the implementation.  Remember the leader DOES NOT have to understand the details of every activity; the leader must trust the team to understand and take the right steps.  This does not mean that the leader disengages; it means that they have to stay on top of the progress through follow-up status meetings, redirect/focus the team as necessary, make sure deadlines are met, resolve conflict, make leadership needed decisions, and most importantly remove any roadblocks and issues.  Trust me, the more that leaders try to get into the details, the slower, less effective, a demoralized a team will become.

Stay tuned for the next post where I will share techniques that I have used in the past as both the leader as well as the one being led.