How to get your team to step up - Part 2

In the last article, How to get your team to step up, I wrote about some of the things people leaders can do to create the conditions for people to do their best work: helping them understand why the work matters, giving them responsibility and showing that you trust them.

But even when you do all of that, things don’t go to plan.

People have off days. Our judgement about someone’s capability can be wrong. And sometimes people simply haven’t yet developed the judgement that comes with experience.

Which brings me back to Michael and Lisa – the characters in the last article.

Michael had asked Lisa to do an important piece of work for one of their biggest clients. He explained why the work mattered, what he needed, when he needed it and asked whether she needed any support.

Lisa was desperate not to let him down.

The work was due by Friday lunchtime, ahead of a client meeting on the Monday. Michael didn’t hear anything from Lisa during the week and, busy with his own work, didn’t check in.

At 11.30 on Friday morning, Lisa sent him a 20-page report.

The quality was good. The problem was that Lisa had done considerably more work than Michael thought was necessary and more than they could reasonably bill the client.

Lisa explained that the report was long because once she got into the detail, it was more complicated than either of them had anticipated. She wasn’t wrong about the complexity, but she had made some poor judgements about what was including in the report.

Michael wrote off some of Lisa’s time and initially treated it as a one-off. But the pattern repeated. Lisa was smart, diligent and conscientious, almost to a fault. When things became complicated, her instinct was to make everything comprehensive and perfect, just in case.

Eventually Michael asked Lisa to sit down with him when there wasn’t a particular job in front of them.

He told her straight: the quality of her work was good, but when things became complex she wasn’t always making the right calls about where to focus her effort.

He also acknowledged that at her level of experience, he shouldn’t expect her to always know.

Then they changed the way they worked together.

Michael would continue to be clear about what he needed. But on more complex pieces of work, Lisa would come back to him part-way through for a ten-minute conversation. She would explain what she had discovered, what she thought was important and where she proposed focusing next. They would talk it through together.

Michael didn’t want to give her the answers. He wanted to help her develop the judgement to find them.

Over time, two things happened.

Lisa became better at distinguishing the important work from the less important. She also became more comfortable asking for help without seeing it as an admission that she wasn’t capable.

Michael changed his approach too.

He realised that delegation wasn’t simply set and forget. If he wanted Lisa to step up, part of his job was to create conversations that helped her build the capability to do so. Initially, he noticed his resignation and frustration with Lisa and how that came through. He learnt to notice those moods and instead give trust and be honest and clear.

Interestingly, Lisa still occasionally pursued work that Michael initially thought was unnecessary. But now they talked about it. Sometimes Michael still disagreed. And sometimes, after hearing her reasoning, he realised she was right.

Michael began taking her to more client meetings and asking her to explain aspects of her work directly to clients, which increased her confidence, work quality and feeling of being trusted even more.

Sometimes for whatever reason, some people don’t step. But when this happens, it’s good to know that you have given your best shot in supporting someone.

But when you build conversations into the flow of the work, people will often surprise you.