Leading People

Issue

The issue that I’m currently facing is to find ways to keep the motivation of my team high and get certain team members to start performing to higher levels. I inherited a team of 5 people, when their previous manager retired. From the leadership pipeline I consider myself at passage one. I have been using pacesetting and coercive as my dominant leadership styles in most of the situations. Since hiring is not frozen, I have to find ways to increase the output levels from my team. I cannot fire people who are not pacesetters as my company policy doesn’t let me hire or replace any existing position. 2 of the team members are performing well where 2 others have been lagging behind. Although the team worked in a coherent fashion in the previous project, I’m seeing some issues in the current project.

From my personal values questionnaire, I see that I have a high need for achievement. My job does require the teams to work in multiple projects and constantly deliver on schedule. This has worked well for me in the past when I was an individual contributor, but all the team members that I inherited are yet to adapt to the aggressive schedule. I do lay more emphasis on getting technical work done. This has prevented me from focusing on coaching and training team members. This was reinforced by the feedback that I received from the annual management feedback survey. I was rated in the lower percentile for coaching and working on the career development for my direct reports. I need to find a balance between working on developing potential leaders and working aggressively to meet project deadlines.

Framework

From lecture on Aug 28th, I used sections explaining motivating high performance as part of my analysis. Performance is measured by ability *support*effort. I also used the whole brain model exercise to understand all the team members. I used my leadership assessment style from the management style questionnaire to develop insights and address gaps. Lastly, I used the Leadership pipeline chapter 2 to understand the issues that I’m facing in the leadership passage.

Experience

I set clear expectations to the team members at the beginning of the project. I evaluated their technical strengths and weakness and assigned challenging tasks to each of them. I expect everybody to look for company’s training material to develop any additional skill sets that they needed. I do expect them to self train themselves without requiring close monitoring. I was clear on the methodology that I wanted and the timelines when I expected the results. In the meantime, I talked to management to volunteer for additional tasks for validating key features. I was happy with the assignments that my team was given. The team members were motivated and well challenged. I laid emphasis on team work in my meetings and the team members were