Building on the last newsletter, where we figured out the reason why chaos happens, let’s shift our attention to the next part – “ Tips For Gaining Stability”.
If you resonated with the complexities outlined in our earlier discussions, consider this your strategic playbook to get some stability.
1. Understand The Uniqueness Of Your Team: No two teams are the same. For each team, there usually will be a goal, a focus, and a peculiarity.
2. Develop Unbiased Awareness of The Implication Of Your Team’s Peculiarity, Then Act Accordingly: Everything has an implication. If you are growth hacking for example, and you don’t have the luxury to recruit top talents and have to work with interns and junior staff, one thing you need to come to terms with is that you need to be very much on ground to provide guidance and review work done from time to time (or you get a top talent who can focus squarely on that). Same way, if you have a team with a set of top professionals, you should expect some power play as each talent would want to show what they’ve got. So, you should constantly reinforce traits that help everyone collaborate healthily, as against leaving everyone divided as if it were a competition.
3. Be Committed To Making Things Better: As a leader, you should wrap up your day by thinking through the challenges you faced for the day and what you need to do better. This is where innovation in leadership comes into place.
4. Institutionalize What’s Working: If you find out that having a standup meeting works to help everyone share progress reports in a faster way, Institutionalize that, and make that a new activity. If a 4-day work week helps your team be better efficient, make that a new normal.
5. Strategically Wind Down What’s Not Working: This is almost clear. However, it’s not always as simple as it is. For example, if you find out that a system of recruiting a new talent is not working for your team, it might sometimes not be so easy to quit that practice, probably because you don’t even know what works yet, or you don’t have enough bandwidth (time, resources etc) to go by a new route, etc. But your focus should be to gradually and strategically start to make those changes.
6. Ask For Feedback: Set up a formal or informal feedback system, and get each person to share their concern and ideas around how to make things better. Most often, you would find out about things you didn’t even know was going on.
7. Maintain Open Communication: Let everyone know they can talk to you about anything, but let them know not every request will be a yes! When you grant a request, communicate why you did, also, if you don’t grant any request, communicate why you didn’t.
8. Use The Right Accountability Systems: Do you want to track your team with an OKR system? or do you want to use the typical task management board system? etc. Using the right accountability system for your team helps you set up structures for accountability as against having that resting on you.
9. Build The Strength To Take Some Bold Step: Sometimes, you might need to take that bold step. Quit that project because it’s not working, Fire that talent because their nasty attitude is starting to spread to everyone else, and raise some money if you truly need cash to get something good done.
10. Constantly Get Better As A Team Manager: Read great content like mine 😉Listen to podcasts, where other leaders talk about how they manage things, listen to Ted Talk to get inspired Get an ‘external’ objective view or professional help (I’m very happy to jump on a 90-minute call with you to evaluate things and build new ways that work with you – https://bit.ly/oneononewitholuwamayowa).
An important note to make is that stability is not a destination but a continuous process. Be committed to improvement, embrace what works, strategically phase out what doesn’t, and foster a culture of open communication and accountability. Take bold steps when needed, and never cease to evolve as a team manager.
Curious to know more about what I do? Let’s chat and explore my work and offerings together:
- Growth strategy & operations efficiency design – bit.ly/strategycallwitholuwamayowa
- Invite me to deliver a training, speaking session – bit.ly/deliveredbyoluwamayowa
- Visit my website: https://oluwamayowaoshidero.com/
- Send an Email: hello@oluwamayowaoshidero.com
- Book a 90Minutes 1-1 Clarity Call with me here – https://bit.ly/oneononewitholuwamayowa
