Ep207: What Great Teams Do Great Issue #11 - How to help the leader with accountability

Humanergy's Chief Questions Asker, David Wheatley, takes a look at another of our What Great Teams Do Great issues - this time, what to do if the team leader is struggling to keep focused on success and holding the team accountable. 

Transcript

Welcome to the Humanergy Leadership Podcast where we tackle your toughest leadership challenges and share practical tools to help you lead with impact.

This episode is part of our What Great Teams Do Great Issues series. I'm David Wheatley. All of these issues use our What Great Teams Do Great model, which is available at humanergy.com in the tools section or in the book of the same name available at all good bookstores. Each issue is presented with suggested actions to get back on the path to team greatness. This week's issue, the team leader doesn't like to make decisions or hold people accountable.

Team members have a high individual standard, but want to have more leadership to address common goals. There is frustration about the leader's inability to remove barriers to success. This is a really challenging one. It can be really awkward and feel like you're stuck between a rock and a hard place. So some actions as they relate particularly to the What Great Teams Do Great model. First one will be to encourage regular review of the discipline cycle.

This provides the opportunity to identify the issues around team leadership. So are we asking the question, are we doing what we said we're gonna do? And if you've used the What Great Teams Do Great model, you can certainly bring this up and say, how frequently should we be stopping and asking if we're doing what we said we should be doing? There's nothing to stop anybody from bringing that up if you're familiar with the What Great Teams Do Great model and the need to move things forward in the way that makes for success.

Another option is speaking with the team leader about the lack of leadership. This requires a deep, transformative choice. There must be a strong commitment to the greater good, a willingness to focus on impact and the people skills to frame up the team's needs while challenging the leader to step up into his or her role. This is the one that's particularly feels awkward. I always think when this kind of feedback comes about, it's like when you come back from lunch, and you have a piece of lettuce between your teeth. You want somebody to tell you and it's going to be embarrassing. You're going to feel a little awkward at first, but then you'll be really pleased that they told you. Much more so than getting home at tea time and looking in the mirror and seeing that piece of lettuce and wondering how many people have seen that and not commented. So when this kind of thing is happening and the team needs it and the team's talking about it, then the most important thing is to be caring, honest and direct and have that conversation with the team leader and even frame it that way. This is a difficult conversation for me to have, but I think it's important for us to have it directly with you so that we actually frame it up. What we need is more accountability. What we need is more focus on what we need to achieve. And that could be that transformative conversation that is necessary to move the team leader either in the right direction or potentially out of the way. With this mindset, a person or a small group from the team could sit with the team leader to explain their concerns and offer assistance to get things back on track. So it doesn't have to be an individual. You can actually have a couple of you to feel like it's a bit more reassuring. So listen to their perspective as well and understand what's causing the issue. Is there a reason why there's a lack of accountability? Is there something else going on from outside of your immediate team that's causing that to pause or stop, making that a little harder for the team leader to do what you're looking for them to do?

Focus on what the team needs to achieve and the necessary timelines. Just because you're a participant and not the team leader doesn't stop you from asking that. It's great to be in any team meeting and say, what is it we're here to achieve? Can we just get clarity as to that? And help the team leader by asking some powerful questions that focus on those two things, what we need to achieve, the goal, and what's our timeline for making sure that happens. All of this needs to be done from a place of support, a place of care, as well as being direct and honest about what's going on. And without coming across as directive, you need to do this. It's a matter of, hey, we see this, this will be beneficial. This could be a better way of moving the team in the right direction, but being open to getting pushback and perspective from the team leader as well. They may have information that you don't have visibility to. Good luck.

That was the Humanergy Leadership Podcast. Make sure you like and subscribe and visit www.humanergy.com for many more resources.