Sharing the glitter

A client leads a team that is growing, inside an organization that's growing. In the early days it was "all hands on deck" and everyone jumped in wherever they could and wherever they saw a need.

Now, however, they are better resourced and there are more systems in place, so my client wants to clarify roles and responsibilities to ensure everyone is working as efficiently and effectively as possible.

This is a team of professionals, all of whom have clear areas of expertise and clear business and personal growth goals. It's also a team whose members are collaborative, who communicate, and who don't fight for "turf" (credit to this leader for cultivating all of that!).

But, as with all teams in all organizations, there are some things that need to get done that don't fall logically into any one person's role, are things that often feel like they "take away from the important, real work" but in fact are things that everyone on the team needs done. Hence we had a robust conversation about how to categorize and distribute necessary but not specialized work.

Here's what we came up with:

1. Does the work support a particular kind of growth or skill/knowledge expansion, and if so which team member would benefit most from taking it on? (this in the spirit of "use the work to develop the people," NOT "use the people as mechanisms for doing the work").
2. Does the work align to any one individual's towering strength, such that it's easier for, enjoyed by and would be best done by them (or perhaps guided/mentored by them in support of another team member's learning, because "if you already know how to do it, find someone who wants to learn it")?
3. Is it a necessary but tedious or administrative sort of work that could be rotated amongst the team members (a great example is recording action items and commitments in a regular team meeting, and presuming few teams have depth at the admin support level any more).
4. Or - and this is where the "glitter" comes in - is the work of a high profile nature such that doing it well will accord the doer some kind of spotlight, attribution or glory?

With the above set of guidelines, the leader can now bring the team together to build out a complete list of everything that needs to be handled, and then figure out which of the above four criteria each item meets. Critical to note that the leader will not be doing this themselves in isolation, because they're not close enough to the specifics. By inviting input from all the team members good decisions can be made about what actually needs to get done, to what level of detail or quality (yes that's a consideration - not everything needs an "A" effort!") and how often.

The team can then determine how best to assign and rotate things, ensuring that things are spread as evenly as possible, that no one gets too much of category 3 and ensuring that anything that falls into the "glitter" bucket gets assigned equitably.

This is a process that we created in the course of one coaching session, and I'm sure it's not perfect and I'm sure it will evolve over time - but the client feels like it's a framework that offers a good start.

If you're running a growing team and are having these discussions I'd love to hear about any approaches or frameworks you use.

#teamleadership #growth #leadership #executivecoaching #startups