How ClarusBlue supported Victoria to increase her confidence as a first time leader, and build cohesion and engagement within her team
Stepping into any new leadership position can be a daunting prospect
Over 85% of first time managers have not received any formal leadership or management training, despite over 80% of companies citing leadership competence as being critical to their organisational success.
It is common place in the corporate world for people to step into, and remain, in leadership positions with no education or coaching in leadership and management capabilities. In fact research shows that over 85% of first time managers have not received any formal leadership or management training, despite over 80% of companies citing leadership competence as being critical to their organisational success.
Whether you’re a first time leader or you’ve been doing it for years, stepping into any new leadership role can be a daunting prospect. The phrase ‘it’s lonely at the top’ can often be true, given that by accepting a leadership position, you take on an increased sense of accountability and responsibility, both for people and business results.
However, taking on a leadership position can also be an incredibly rewarding experience, and whether you’re more natually aligned to leadership, or naturally aligned to management there are many things that we can do to improve our effectivness as leaders. There are many schools of thought on how much of leadership is nature vs nurture, but our experience shows that no matter where you start from, understanding some of the core principles of leadership and how to apply these in practice can help you lead with more impact and build high performing teams.
Victoria’s story
“My team were constantly coming to me to ask about things I felt they really should be able to understand, or for me to give them decisions on things they should be able to make decisions on themselves, meaning I was spending far more time in the detail of the work than I felt I wanted to be.”
“I had recently taken on a new role as a Product Owner, leading a team of seven to provide applications within the business to support our business colleagues to work more effectively and deliver efficiency improvements to business processes. After a few months we were doing well as a team, but I had already spotted a few areas of concern for me.
I was finding that the team were kind of just going through the motions, delivering the tasks on the backlog and were doing a good job but not a great job. They were coming to me to ask about things they really should be able to understand and make decisions on themselves, meaning I was spending far more time in the detail of the work than I felt I wanted to be, which was preventing me doing my role of managing business relationships and seeking out new improvement opportunities. We had quite tough targets to achieve that year and I was finding the pressure was pushing my levels of stress and the way I was engaging with the team in a direction I didn’t feel was a positive one.
I got in touch with Will at ClarusBlue through a referral and as we talked through the problems, I was immediately reassured by the way he listened to the problems I was facing and within the first session, helped me to gain clarity on what I wanted to achieve and what my main goals were. As it turned out, what I really wanted to do was create a really engaged team of people who were able to do their best work.”
What we did to support Victoria
There is no one set of attributes or style that creates a high performing team, you need to have the correct diversity of skillsets, styles and competencies to compliment the inevitable strengths and weakenesses of each other.
We started off by helping Victoria to understand whether she had more of a natural affinity for leadership, or for management. What drives this is hard wired into our brains and is a spectrum that we all sit along somewhere. Understanding your natural alignment is critical to success for anyone in a leadership position, because it helps you to know what your strengths will be, but also where you might need to build strength in depth around you. We quickly identified that Victoria fell more onto the leadership side, but had some good management attributes in the mix as well helped us to tailor our coaching and mentoring approach, to ensure the leadership style we were to help her develop was authentic to both her and her team. From there we focused on a few key areas over the coming months.
Team purpose: The initial objective was to help Victoria define and communicate the ‘why’ for her team. Many of her team saw themselves as ‘just’ developers, with little real understanding about why they were doing what they were doing. Once we had supported her to develop a more outcome based purpose, we encouraged her to start taking some of the developers into stakeholder conversations, and instead of investing time in reviewing technical solutions, invest more time up front in helping the team understand the client situation and objectives. The impact of this on team engagement was almost immediately visible, through the the uplift in quality of work and ideas coming through from the team.
Understand and leverage your team composition: All of us have inherent skills, competences and types of work we like, as well as inherent weaknesses, or types of work we just dislike. There is no one set of attributes or style that creates a high performing team, you need to have the correct diversity of skillsets, styles and competencies to compliment the inevitable strengths and weakenesses of each other. We worked with Victoria’s team to conduct an assessment as a group of each team members’ natural ‘role’, to identify each person’s strengths, how they might contribute to the team most effectively and, most importantly, eachother’s weaknesses and dislikes. This fun but impactful exercise led to the team really ‘owning’ their roles and collaborating far more effectively. It also helped to shape future hiring for the team to ensure that the most effective level of diversity of style and thinking was achieved.
Achieving focus, ownership and agility: With both the purpose and the understanding achieving good improvements already, the last step was to help Victoria really optimise the team’s way of working. What we observed was that the team had far too many things on thier plate at once, work was dragging on for long periods of time and while relationships in the team were better, people were still working as individuals. We supported Victoria to embed more agile ways of working in her team, minimising the amount of things in progress and getting developers to collaborate on deliverables to complete them faster. Taking this approach helped the team actually deliver work much faster, to a higher level of quality, with less requirement for Victoria to be in the detail of the work.
What was the impact for Victoria?
“The increase in pace of delivery and quality of work by the team through the agile ways of working was nothing short of mindblowing. We rapidly went from a ‘middle of the pack’ team, to significantly out performing not only every team in our department, but in our division as a whole, overachieving on our financial targets by 80% while achieving the highest client satisfaction scores in the division!”
“Firstly I was honestly really surprised at how quickly we saw improvements in the team with only a few changes that were easily implemented. What became clear to me early on was the difference between where the team needed management and where they needed to be empowered and enabled through leadership.
Awareness of the team in terms of the problems our stakeholders were facing, helped them to think more creatively and independently and visibly increased the sense of value that their work had to them. The team assessment was a hugely impactful exercise, I was nervous about this at the start, but the way Will ran the session made it so much fun and he helped everyone in the team at an individual level feel comfortable with themselves and be proud of thier own style and what it could offer to the team. This for me was possibly the most critical element as it firstly enabled me to understand how I shaped the work and responsibilities of the team to best suit them, but it also helped the team work more collaboratively together, leaning on each other for support rather than just me.
Finally the increase in pace of delivery and quality of work by the team through the agile ways of working was nothing short of mindblowing. We rapidly went from a ‘middle of the pack’ team, to significantly out performing not only every team in our department, but in our division as a whole, overachieving on our financial targets by more than 80% while achieving the highest client satisfaction scores in the division!
In terms of impact for me personally, working with Will empowered me to really build my confidence as a leader. Despite the fact we worked together throughout the transformation of my team, his style of coaching and mentoring made it feel like my success, and the inspiration he provided supported me to want to keep going, even when we hit bumps in the road. His depth of knowledge and experience, coupled with seeming to know when encouragement or a tough truth is needed, helped me to focus on what mattered and lead in a way that felt natural to me.”
Do you want to increase your leadership impact and effectiveness?
Whether you’re stepping into a leadership role for the first time or have been leading for years, find out how we might be able to help by booking a free 20 minute intro call with us at the link below.