Team Leadership – who’s in charge?
I was asked to take over the redesign project as lead engineer after a team from another site had struggled and failed to meet the financial target. The assignment came with one condition (which, in hindsight, should have been a big red flag): “Don’t let the original leader know he’s not in charge anymore, we need to keep him engaged.”
As you might have guessed, the subsequent 24 months were not fun. It was nearly impossible to get alignment on any decision. We had so many meetings discussing and re-discussing the same issues ad nauseum. We kept up the pretense and slogged through the work, ultimately delivering a successful cost-reduced redesign. However, if I had it to do over again, I’m quite certain we could have delivered on the goal in half the time if team leadership had been clearly defined.
Management made several fundamental errors with this team:
(1) They should have recognized the original project was not on track and intervened to course-correct much sooner.
(2) They should have trusted the original team leader to act professionally and contribute despite being displaced, rather than feel it necessary to deceive him.
(3) They should have made the leadership responsibilities unambiguous to everyone involved.
This and so many other hard-won lessons have culminated in the approach used in CAEDENCE's "Lead On!™" leadership development program. Check it out here:
https://www.caedenceconsulting.com/services (scroll down and click on Leadership Development Program for Individuals and Groups )
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Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
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