As a leader you are two things for your team, you are a shield and a sieve.
As a shield, your job is to block out the nonsense that is happening outside the team. Frustrated customers, angry executives, drama, chaos, ambiguous information. There is nothing productive in these things…all they will do is derail, distract and ultimately impact your team negatively. Sure if a customer or executive is frustrated, you need to handle that situation, but you take that to the team as a story of opportunity to help solve pain or get a project back on track. You never go to them and say “The CEO is really frustrated with our delivery as a team.” This doesn’t mean that you don’t coach your team and work through problems that individuals have on the team, it just means that you keep that inside the team and don’t let the outside world impact the team negatively.
As a sieve, your job is to filter out the things from outside the team that will be beneficial to the team. Credit, shoutouts, kudos, celebrations, happy customers, happy executives and the like are all things the team should hear about and in an enthusiastic manner. It’s important to always make sure they are aware of all the positive impact. As a leader if you are getting credit or kudos, your team is directly responsible for that, so you should be sharing that with them and including them in the conversation in the moment is happens, even if they aren’t around.
This may seem a little different, but you are a leader now…your success is based on how successful you can make your team. It’s your job now to shield them from blame and pass on the credit to them.
I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions or want to dive more into a topic, let me know. Thanks for being here!
