Too many managers fail to decide on the primary leadership goal for their team which leads to dysfunction and under-performance. As a leader, if you don't make the conscious choice of priority goal, you undercutting your team's capabilities right from the start. Here's how to fix that now and turn things around.

Read on: blog.WednesdayWin.com​

Read time: 5 minutes

Let's explore this challenge with some example of how you can fix this:

Choose wisely and with intention

You have many choices over how to manage your team from close oversight to self-organizing around projects. What's essential though, is that you choose and optimize around your primary strategic goal for your team as part of the larger goals of the organization.

Managers frequently bring their own bias to their role depending on whether they are seeking promotion, trying to stand out or stay below the radar, pursue high team satisfaction, or some other personal priority.

To be effective though and succeed no matter what your personal goal is, one must first determine your ultimate function for the next year or other key interval. In other words, what's the job your team has been hired to do right now?

I'll explore four common jobs to do below.

• Without an overall understanding of your team's role, you can't guide them there effectively
• First, determine, decide, and commit to your role
• Infuse that primary mission throughout all of your process and priorities

Let's look at four possible options for overarching team goals:

1. Manage for innovation

Managing for innovation is common at startups and tougher for large companies. It requires clear communication (backed by actions) that action is encouraged even when the outcome is uncertain.

The priority is agility. Try new things. Learn. Iterate. Tomorrow's work will be different than today's.

Failures and unanticipated mistakes are expected and tolerated or even encouraged as long as it remains below reckless levels.

Change is embraced, encouraged, and shared with the rest of the organization. Teams are small and nimble and iterate quickly. No one is afraid to reinvent the world.

Pros:

• This is where new products and processes are born
• Massive long-term value can be created and developed

Cons:

• There can be a lot of failure before successes
• Duplication of effort is common as multiple small teams may be trying to solve the same issue
• It's hard to manage in command and control style organizations

2. Manage for efficiency

For established businesses, this is often the goal: streamline operations by improving productivity (or as author and WSJ columnist Andy Kessler likes to say, "eat jobs").

Teams like this are attempting to grow by cutting costs through improved operations and better data, people, and product workflows that make their product or service for internal or external customers more efficient.

Even fast growing organizations sometimes need periods of efficiency focus to consolidate what's been learned, make organizational adjustments, prepare for the next phase of growth. You need to understand when you are in this mode vs. others.

Pros:

• Practices are usually well-described and understood by MBAs and other students of classical management
• Significant productivity improvements are often possible which can lower costs significantly
• Hyper process-focused employees are easier to hire and train

Cons:

• Will squeeze the innovators out of the team eventually as they'll be bored and under-utilized
• Growth through cost-reduction usually has a low ceiling

3. Manage for fast scale growth

If your team is supporting or enabling a fast growth service or product or if you are spinning up a team to take on a newly defined challenge, you are likely managing for scaling growth.

Unlike managing for innovation, you are a trying to keep up with an organizational demand that's understood, but far beyond your current capabilities (or will be by tomorrow).

This mode requires constantly looking at how to increase work throughput, lowering barriers to quick decisions, and trying keep budgets reasonable while costs are growing fast.

Pros:

• By embracing the needs, you can better align resources to clearing the blockers to growth that the market is demanding
• Ideal for ambitious staff with high potential, but maybe limited experience; creates lots of room for fast team member growth

Cons:

• Costs can quickly outpace underlying growth without careful oversight
• Not everyone can make the journey from yesterday's needed job to tomorrow's
• Scale growth can feel especially chaotic for managers who are faced with changing challenges everyday

4. Manage for consolidation

This is a tough goal for most managers to embrace, but some teams or even entire organizations need to scale down their work and squeeze out unnecessary costs and commitments.

Just as economies cycle through periods of growth and stagnation, so too some companies. You may need to discontinue products, reduce levels of service or simply find ways to reduce costs.

Empowering your team to understand their mission and the long-term benefits can improve morale and allow each member to make the most of the situation.

Pros:

• Sometimes, this work is simply necessary and can contribute to the recovery or long term health of the business
• By involving your team in the mission, they can bring their best selves to the task and possibly find pathways to success otherwise missed

Cons:

• It's never fun to be shrinking your business, your team, or your scope of work
• When clearly communicating that you are a reduction mode overall, you risk losing your best staff first; you need to find ways to keep them engaged and excited

Action Summary

It's not enough to manage your team well. You need to understand the role your team is playing and manage to that expectation.

Embracing that function will determine the policies you set, the procedures you follow, and how you set and evaluate expectations of each member of the team.

If your priority is innovation, but your team is operating in max efficiency, you'll both be disappointed. Similarly, if you are in consolidation mode, but your team is thinking innovation, you'll have a range of disasters to clean up.

• Evaluate what's expected and needed from your team
• Align your management to that purpose
• Communicate those expectations both explicitly and by your actions and feedback
• Recognize that the role can change over time, but not week to week or day to day
• Get aligned and unleash the power of your team's creativity

What do you think? What have you seen that works the best? Reply to this email and let me know.

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To your success,

Christopher

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P.S. Like this one? You'll probably want to check out this earlier Wednesday Win essay on how setting your team's culture is essential to long-term success, too.

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