The hard part of leadership is not learning the best practices...

...it's changing your mindset and your behaviors.

Let me explain.

So much has been written on team leadership best practices. When I search for ‘leadership” on Google, here’s what I see:

About 5,720,000,000 results (0.47 seconds)?

When I search for “leadership books” on Amazon, here’s what I see:

Over 60,000 results for "leadership books"

And I probably receive five personal invitations a week to attend transformational leadership development events or programs.

Are there really 60,000 different ways to build and lead a team? Does the subject of leadership development really justify more than 50-100 well researched and written articles and books? Is leadership such a complex topic to justify the proliferation of so much content and how useful is it to those who aspire to be more effective and impactful leaders?

I mean no offense to the many brilliant authors of these books; however, sometimes I feel we complicate what is actually a relatively straight forward competency to understand. Sure, you can attend seminars on the ten or fifteen best practices of a great team leader. You can even write them on high stock laminated paper and place it on your desk.

In my view, however, the best way to become a great team leader is to focus on a narrow set of fundamentals and commit to new behaviors that align with them. Committing to these fundamentals, and overcoming limiting beliefs and behaviors, is where the rubber really meets the road. Without some structure and persistent experimentation and practice, however, almost nothing you learn—from a book or in a seminar— will likely stick.

Given the dizzying abundance of thoughts on team leadership best practices, I’d like to share my view of the most fundamental areas. These are the foundational behaviors that I believe a successful team leader must develop if he or she has any hope of sustainably leading a high performing team.

As you read the basics of team leadership outlined below, consider reflecting on your team leadership effectiveness. Consider whether you are fully satisfied with your performance in this role and whether you are under-developed in any of these areas. If there are areas where you feel you could improve, it may be worth engaging a leadership coach to help develop those skills.

Now, I understand the temptation to forge ahead on your own and learn through experience. However, this approach carries risks. Without the guidance of a coach, you are likely to make preventable mistakes that could damage your reputation and negatively impact your colleagues' experiences.

The Basics of Team Leadership

Leadership is a competency that develops and evolves over time. Here are six areas that I believe are foundational to succeeding in this role.

Know Yourself

Know yourself. What are the qualities you appreciate most in yourself? What are the areas that are less-developed and need strengthening to perform your role? You can only answer these question when you’re honest with yourself. And from this honesty emerges the changes that can contribute to your growth.

I was coaching a client this Monday, discussing how his leadership behaviors were serving him and the organization, and after a few minutes, he said “yea, I guess I have a tough time not being the person who has all of the answers.” That was an important insight: that his belief that he needed to have all of the answers was stifling those around him and limiting the team’s success.

Know Your People - Individually

That’s right, make time to get to know your people—individually. When you accepted the role to lead the team, you assumed responsibility for integrating their talents, their interests and their energy and aligning them with organizational goals.

You can’t accomplish that without knowing the skills each possesses, how they like to have impact, and what matters to them. If you don’t have insight into this, you can’t know how to motivate each person and assign tasks and responsibilities. If you ask people to do unchallenging work that means nothing to them, they can become bored and unmotivated. If you ask people to take on responsibilities without the required skills, then they will be overcome by stress and risk failure.

You job is to thread the needle—take the time to do this right.

Let People Know You

In most organizational cultures today, the glorified stoic leader of the past is not going to inspire others to perform well. The world of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) we live in and real changes to social norms have implications for how we all show up at work. Like it or not, you set the example. You model behavior others will note and in many cases, imitate. If people don’t know who you are and where you stand, how can they trust you?

Tension consumes energy and grabs a chunk of our body budgets. When the tension is persistent, we burn out. High performing teams are unsustainable without a high degree of psychological safety. When you share aspects of how you are feeling about a situation at work, when you listen the views of others and make them feel they matter, when you encourage participation and refrain from retaliation, you go a long way in creating trust and safety.

Create a Purpose People Can Rally Around

People want to work on something that matters to them, something bigger than themselves. Often, this relates to having an impact on something they feel strongly about. Other times, it’s about the thrill of working with people they enjoy being with. Whatever you choose to project, people rally around a shared purpose. So instead of starting with the tasks that need to be completed, start by focusing on the collective purpose of your team and the entire organization.

Here’s a quote that illustrates the point:

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." - Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Convey to Each Person They Matter

At the most basic level, people long to matter. If you want to motivate your team, let them know what they do matters to you, the team and the organization. Recognize their contributions and let them know you believe they can contribute more and you are prepared to support them.

This does not mean offering gratuitous complements. Rather, this means putting them in a position to succeed in their role, by identifying the 2-3 things you appreciate about their work, and finding specific ways they are or could be contributing.

Sometimes people are in roles they’re unable to perform. When this happens, it’s better to have that difficult conversation about finding a better fit or developing a development plan than to communicate your displeasure with their performance. When you choose the former approach, you show the person matters.

Become the Master of Your Emotions

Emotions can make or break our leadership success. Learning to regulate and harness emotions is a lifelong project for all of us. And it is hugely important and challenging.

Emotions are alerts that reflect how we are making meaning in a situation—how we choose to respond to these alerts is core to how we show up with our team. Sometimes when we look back on our responses, we wonder how we chose them. How did the cognitive part of the brain get sidelined by the emotional region of the brain?

Emotions can be used positively, to motivate us, and to motivate others. For example, when you feel excited, eager, focused and optimistic, sharing emotions can have a tremendously positive impact on those around us and on the collective performance of the team. They are contagious.

When we’re filled with negative emotions that overwhelm our cognitive abilities, however, things can become a bit more complicated and dangerous. When a peer says something that angers you, when a direct report misses a deadline or does a poor job on a project, when your boss criticizes your performance—how do you respond? What is the consequence of that response?

We all start from a different place when it comes to emotional regulation. Emotional regulation is an area impacted by our upbringing and how our genetic makeup responds to the environment we’re operating in. Some of us developed strong emotional regulation abilities in our childhood while others less so. In certain environments, we are less able to regulate our emotions than in others.

Our ability to regulate our emotions, fortunately, is not fixed. There are proven methods for regulating your negative emotions, such as reappraising, labeling and distancing. All of these techniques take work and commitment that’s well worth the investment. Failing to learn how to regulate negative emotions in the workplace can undermine all other positive leadership qualities in a person.

Summing it Up

There are 60,000 books and tens of thousands of articles written on leadership development. I suspect if we input all into a summarizing algorithm, these six qualities would emerge:

• Know yourself
• Know your people - individually
• Let people know you
• Create a purpose people can rally around
• Convey to each person they matter
• Become the master your emotions

About David Ehrenthal

After a 25+ year career as a marketing executive and CEO, in the US and Europe, I created Mach10 Career & Leadership Coaching. As a coach, I help people overcome the obstacles that are preventing them from reaching your important professional goals. This may mean helping a client: become a more skilled and impactful leader, successfully transitioning to a new role, progressing more quickly in their career, avoiding burnout, adapting creatively to rapid change, or reconsidering career direction.

Please email David at [email protected] or give him a ring at 617-529-8795 if you want to talk.