24 October 2019
3 Habits To Avoid When Managing Your Team
In last month’s interview chaired at the annual Village Global conference, eyes seemed glued at Bill Gates’ every word. For some members, his advice may as well have been gospel for the 1990s tech entrepreneur; business à la ‘command and control’, with team feelings and behaviours at best, an afterthought. But sat opposite the well-known tech titan was a different type of entrepreneur.
To many, Eventbrite co-founder Julia Hartz represents a new generation of leader; a no-nonsense leadership figure, but one who enters the room with a sense of smart empathy that channels talent towards results.
Contrasting both leadership styles may signify a shift in culture and a new era, but a deeper dive into the trend towards quantifying behavioural habits as a productivity factor may also uncover traits that leaders across all sectors should follow – and which we should all better avoid.
MISTAKE 1: BEGINNING THE MEETING WITH SMALL TALK
Born on the outskirts of East London, Chuka Umunna is not your Eaton stereotype: performance-raised and highly qualified, the young politician recognises which behaviours add the management fuel to rise through the ranks.
And for Mr Umunna, it starts with something as simple as procedurally removing small-talk from key meetings: "meetings are about results’’ says the politician and be is on a mission to rebrand politics with the corporate image it deserves. ‘’Reports and large cases are my life at this point’’, he describes sipping on his lightly catenated green-tea beverage, and he is quick to add that meetings not living up to that same corporate efficiency are simply perpetuating an image that holds wave-making policy back.
And when we compare this intuition to Maslow’s (2017) official six tenets for systematic meeting excellence, the priorities implied by each target improvement may hold a clue to how productive meetings are both technologically – and behaviourally – initiated by managers in fortune-500 enterprises: the 5-10 minutes of unstructured conversation that plagues the beginning of most work meetings cumulatively represent the effective year cost of a full-time employee – and that figure only rises for larger teams and projects (Genk, 2017).
Maslow’s Meeting Technology Pyramid, Revised for 2017
However, not only does the habit of engaging in small talk mean lost time from important team meetings – this may also be allowing deep-seated problems to escape through the cracks.
MISTAKE 2: LETTING MISTAKES GO UN-NOTICED
For most teams, ‘shooting for the moon’ is at best a metaphor for top-notch performance. But for Jessica Meir, leading her team to the earth’s outer atmosphere is a concrete project requirement. And in a project scenario where even the slightest mistakes can mean a punctured spacesuit or miscalculating the fuel needed to re-enter orbit – behaviourally noticing early warning signals among team members becomes a key priority.
In addition to establishing behavioural boundaries for how meetings with team members are started, this may call for another social protocol: when a mistake – or at least an early warning sign – is noticed by the project leader, abruptly correcting or questioning a team member mid-conversation is actually a behaviour that can bring you and your team members closer together.
An overly informal or meeting structure is a recipe for warning signs that go unnoticed, and this behaviour can undermine tasks towards even the clearest of objectives: as the Microsoft founder Bill Gates describes, managing time into 5-minute segments is near-impossible without this capacity to assert direct conversational boundaries; but even if not intuitive, team members actually see more social engagement and enthusiasm in a work environment when the team leader establishes this social protocol from day one (Mihaela, 2014).
MISTAKE 3: NOT PRACTICING WHAT YOU PREACH
The subtle shifts in behaviour and body language that undermine management scenarios are key to spot and avoid before they take their full toll – but is establishing these behavioural standards in the human resources manual enough to keep productivity on track?
Pangaro’s Model for Conversational Leadership, 2009
Our societal constructs of organisations and project motives may tell us one story – but instinctively – team members are hard-wired to model real-time examples of active leadership behaviourally; and this means a potential conflict between our ‘textbook’ guidelines and the leadership reference team members have to fall back on when pressure strikes (Pangaro, 2009).
Ultimately, compliance with tasks and procedures can be instilled through modern semi-automated training. But even in today’s team environments, tuning the behaviours of your team members still requires in-person demonstration – and that means ensuring a real-life demonstration from you as the project leader.
ACTIONS TO APPLY AS A TEAM LEADER:
If you are a project manager or team leader in the professional coaching sector, consider applying the following tasks in-time for your next team session:
Practice a meeting ‘start phrase’: It may seem simple, but just as the tone of the best book chapter is set by the introduction page; the structure to your opening statement in a team meeting could be the final ingredient your team members need to fully switch into gear. And in fact, your team members know as well as you do that mentions of the weather and the generic ‘how was your weekend’ are ultimately social programming that adds no value to your professional relationships.
Develop a ‘conversation-break’ protocol: This one may be less awkward to initiate. But your capacity to pause enjoyable conversations with your team-members when chatting by the water cooler could mean the difference between quickly correcting a warning sign – and allowing mistakes to fester until a point of no return.
Self-tune first; teach second: When we think of a process such as life-or-death surgery, operating on a real-life patient without previous in-person training and demonstrations would be unimaginable: from the step-by-step detail to subtle hand-gestures, there is something about the immersive experience of real-life observation that textbook training cannot replace. This is the same for you and your team members – but could this also call into question whether you have been exposed to the best behavioural tuning that your role demands?
At CONQA Group, we have had the opportunity to condense hundreds of behaviours and management methodologies (each handpicked from across all high-performance sectors) into a format that can be absorbed by a team leader under a one-day seminar format.
We all know that true managers recognise expertise as a prize that can only be truly mastered through in-person trial-and-error. But as further hints are left by the leaders and entrepreneurs making the headline – the habit of discovering already-established behaviours through years of trial-and-error could be the costliest habit of them all.