Your team is more skilled than you

Objective

Whatever team you are responsible for – at whatever level, in whatever business, in whatever function – it is absolutely vital that you do not confuse leadership skills with functional skills. Leadership is an art demanding intensive understanding, development and practice across a wide range of interpersonal activities. What it is not is a replacement for the very considerable and detailed functional skills normally required in any specific part of a business.

I have indicated elsewhere how significant a priority it is for you to select the right individuals for your team. Core to this selection process is identifying individuals who are more expert than you in their given area; and core to maintaining your team’s effectiveness is privately and publicly ensuring that these superior skills are recognised and heralded.

Your objective is to be first among equals as leader, last among equals as functional specialist.

Context

Sometimes (perhaps very often) this approach to competence is painful – making decisions oneself, or delegating them to nominated individuals, is much simpler than balancing the knowledge of varying groups. But if you can get this approach right, your team members will feel they are contributing when they should. And if you can make your focus the process of enabling this then they will realise that their inclusion is based first and foremost on their skills and experience and not seniority, title or status. This, then, allows them to feel personal value.

With this approach in place, you will realise that leadership is not about knowing more than your team. To the contrary, it is about the humility of recognising you know less. It is not about leading through the example of having the answers to everything, but through delivering superior performance in orchestrating above-average collective insight. It means that leadership is about delivering an extraordinarily challenging, and sometimes near-impossible, balance – that while you must put yourself forward charismatically to drive the vision and purpose, you should, if anything, put yourself in the intellectual background.

Challenge

Many business issues are multi-faceted and complex, even on a day-to-day basis, and demand integrated and sophisticated answers. Very frequently we find that superior performance is delivered by the organisations which have thought these issues through the most carefully. But what we also know is that many of these increasingly sophisticated responses are being made with increasing speed. As business leaders we then face the challenge of delivering the ever more complex ever more rapidly.

There are two alternative leadership styles to this challenge, which I believe are increasingly unlikely to be effective.

• Directive leader – the one we have probably all met, the one who not only likes to use leadership as a platform for the extensive articulation of opinions, but who likes to direct what happens. This is the individual who comes to believe that leadership confers experience across all disciplines and whose raison d’être is action – to be seen in the driving seat, to be seen making decisions. Such a leadership, based on ego and willpower, while it can be extremely effective at the individual decision level, will become increasingly distanced from the detailed knowledge required to confront a multiplicity of issues.
• Empowering leader – who believes in empowerment as a liberating mantra but who, in correctly identifying the energising effect of bestowing responsibility on the individual, may overlook the more powerful synergies that arise from combining different individuals’ skills collaboratively (and which requires some constraints of empowerment).

What is required instead, to confront complex challenges, is an approach that pools knowledge and experience in a cross-functional and non-hierarchical manner.

Success

Successful knowledge sharing does not mean that organisations become some form of brains trust, paralysed into inaction through the continual intensity of analysis. Nor does it mean that decision-making should be done by standing committee. It means that in confronting issues your team should expect to work with the following principles.

• Customer-led focus – you communicate, as a first principle, that issues should never be seen in a departmental context but always with a business-wide, customer-led focus.
• Flexibility – you ensure that while the whole team is aware of current major challenges, they are also aware that problem-solving will always be undertaken by drawing on the required skills case by case.
• Ad hoc teams – you create ad hoc teams time and time again, relentlessly so, to deal with ongoing challenges.
• Brief – you set these teams a clear brief with a clear timetable to deliver recommended solutions.
• Your role – you chart your role as an organiser and final evaluator, not a prime mover of the analysis itself.
• Removing obstacles – you ensure that any resource or attitude constraints are removed.

This approach will be further augmented by the way you enable your team members to work together. When they see that their participation in problem-solving is based on their ability to contribute, so they will develop a greater respect for each other’s competence, and also realise the extent to which they can learn from each other – that, in effect, their personal value is interdependent.

Pitfalls

There is a balance to be struck between sharing ideas and decision-making – too much of the former can impede the latter! While team members will want (and deserve) respect for their own skills, they will also want to see effective decision-making. They are unlikely to be motivated by a leadership style so humble and deferential that issue resolution is avoided. So you must avoid:

• overly consensual decision-making where too much allowance (and time) is made for conflicting views;
• a culture in which respect for opinion means that everyone offers an opinion on everything;
• any feeling that because your team members are functional specialists they are not expected to display leadership characteristics.

This is a tough balance. As an effective leader you will learn when to encourage opinion or when to impose a decision, when to encourage or when to end debate, when to stand back and when to take the lead on an issue.

Leaders’ checklist

• However much you articulate your sense of leadership in driving your business forward, never articulate the idea that you have all the answers – articulate instead that you are there to provide a framework (a working culture) for others to find solutions.
• Try to exclude yourself, where you can, from the immediate processes that are being used to tackle issues (unless they are of such strategic significance that your absence would be construed as negligence) – be seen to stand back and let the experts take the lead.
• Use 121s with your direct reports to learn about their areas of functional specialism – let them know that you want to learn and that you see them as having a crucial role in this respect.
• Have a bias towards using ad hoc rather than standing teams to confront issues so that you always apply the skills needed for the challenge.
• Recognise success in your team publicly and regularly – and never take the credit for others’ ideas.