Hopefully you know this, but maybe you don’t. Leadership isn’t about big events. It’s not about leading a team into battle, or up out of the valley, at least not all the time.
More often than not, leadership is about doing the small things, and making your team feel like their best.
You want your team to be firing on all cylinders. In order for that to happen, your team needs to feel a few things.
They need to feel important, guided, and believed in.
Getting to that point is very difficult. It takes time, effort, and you dropping your ego.
I personally tend to fall short in making people feel important or believed in. I can guide a tree to sunlight mainly because making people feel guided is the easiest one. Guiding someone is just telling someone what to do, easy day.
Leadership isn’t about telling what to do, or even knowing what to do, it’s about creating the environment for your people to succeed. And that environment starts with five things.
These five things ideally should be done in the first session of whoever you’re leading.
The first thing: Learn everyone’s names.
My dad is quite the leader. He’s a high school math teacher, and if I’m being honest, I’ve gotten the bulk of my leadership skills from him. Now here’s the thing, he knows people’s names. Or he knows their nicknames, which he makes up.
On the first day of classes the point becomes to know everyone’s names. It’s the first step in getting to know your people. Knowing their names has to be the first thing you do.
The second thing: Establish the vision.
Secondly, you need to establish the vision of what you’re doing. Any group with a leader has a goal. A sports team looks to win a championship, a marketing department wants to bring in additional revenue, a soup kitchen wants to help people.
By establishing the vision on the first day, you’re establishing where the group is going. Creating that common goal is the second piece of the puzzle that is building an effective team.
The third thing: Set the expectations.
The third thing is setting the expectations. If vision is the destination, the expectations are the directions. These are the things that the team is expected to do.
Maybe you expect your team to be working from 9am to 5pm daily with a one hour lunch break. Or you don’t care about timing as long as projects are completed by Fridays.
Expectations are yours to set, and the team’s to follow.
The fourth thing: Learn something else.
The next thing is to learn more about your team!
Who in your group loves their work, and who in your group is there for a paycheck?
Kids? Vacation spots? Maybe they don’t want to tell you anything, that’s something you can learn.
Go in with no ideas of what should happen, just make it your goal to learn one new thing about all your people, aside from their name.
The fifth thing: Connect with your people.
This one could be the hardest, it also could be the easiest.
Take what you learned about everyone, and tell them something about yourself. Something you can connect on, build a relationship.
As you go, you can build on this.
But if you do these five things, you’ll be off to a good start in building an effective team.
I started this yesterday, but I’m adding in a little question for you at the end of all of these. I’m on day three of thirty straight days of publishing something on here. And I’m on day two of putting a question in here to make you think a little deeper.
“When they were building Rome, what do you think they had in mind?”