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New Team Leaders’ Relationship Management Angst

Top Tips to Surf through RELATIONSHIP ANXIETY

Over the past year, a rising source of anxiety for first time managers of people in teams has been how to relate to friends who are now members of teams they lead. These friends cover the spectrum from intimate friends they meet with socially, to befriended individuals who participated in the same teams as themselves, before they got promoted.

As a first-time team leader- whether titled segment team leader, territory team leader, advanced analytics team leader, test design lead, or any other of the proliferating titles for this role- you may even have previously exchanged personal grievances about management, with some of them.

Now, you have effectively joined management ranks. You find yourself in perpetual internal conflict with what you believe your company’s often implicit new team leader role expectations of you are, and simultaneously holding back from executing on some of them. You may not even always be fully aware of why you find yourself so emotionally entangled.

Common sources of ambivalence are not wanting to;

  • Lose long-standing friendship benefits
  • Be seen as elevating yourself above peers
  • Act disloyally to former peers

When you accept a promotion to lead team members, either reporting directly to you, or in an influencing capacity, accept that you will have to adapt how you have conducted yourself before. You have assumed accountability for ensuring team members produce outcomes the organisation values, as contributory to strategic goal accomplishment. Essentially, you have acquired decision-making powers affecting their careers and work experiences.

When you are on this ambivalence track, recognise there are ways to explore switching from it, to gain better perspective of the proficiency demands of your new position, and useful attitudes and behaviour to adopt.

1. Adopt a more expansive map of relationships

This is the first time in the careers of many team leaders when serious consideration has to be given to self in relation to others and how they appear to them.

  • Inevitably, you may trust your friends more than others in your team. Regardless, unless you can build trusting working relationships with all team members, your ability to influence them to take required action will be constrained.
  • Managing individuals shifts the focus to relationship-management through which performance is secured.

-Your emotional connection with the rest of the team will influence their behaviour, and in the end, their performance.

-Communicating to your whole team, as early as possible, what the organisation expects of you in your new role, and how you will exercise it, sets the tone well for your leadership intent.

  • If you do not communicate the way forward, friends will assume nothing has changed between you and them.

– They may even anticipate a continued flow of information on what is happening in the company, that you may acquire privileged access to, and that they do not have a need to know. This is what some new team members have come to discover.

  • Creating dysfunctional team dynamics will reduce team performance and undermine your own standing as team leader.

2. Value the importance of role boundary management

Differentiating social meetings from work meetings seems obvious taken at face value. In practice, this proves otherwise, because we care deeply about not offending our friends.

  • How you behave socially and the information you exchange with friends, should not extend to discussing fellow team members, as may have been your habit previously.

-When others are referred to in an unfavourable light, being mindful that you represent the whole team and not only parts of it, will support you in acknowledging the feedback, and still remaining impartial.

  • Another oversight is ignoring the behaviour of friends who take up too much space in team meetings, shutting down others’ views, and risking groupthink, because you do not wish to ruin your friendships.

-Bear in mind too, it would be naïve to think that all your friends would want you to succeed.

-Some may unconsciously still be competing with you, having been in the running for your promotion. 

  • Maintaining a distinction between your private and work life gains prominence at this time too.

-One senior team leader battled with this distinction in the mistaken belief that to do so would make him an inauthentic leader.

– Inadvertently, bringing his private life to work was accompanied by bringing his moods associated with it to work.

– His team members noticed this. They experienced him as unapproachable and unsupportive on days when he was unhappy or frustrated, and so avoided him.

-This led to regular retrospectives with them, because outcomes were repeatedly unsatisfactory, due to his guidance not being sought, when team members needed it the most3.

3. Disassociate being liked or disliked from performance or behavioural feedback.

We are emotionally programmed to be more accepting of positive than negative feedback.

  • Although positive feedback inspires higher motivation, actionable feedback about unacceptable behaviour and performance, communicated clearly and thoughtfully, can still be experienced as growth-promoting by recipients.

-If you only give glowing performance and behavioural feedback, you could paint yourself into a corner, by raising expectations.

-Disgruntled team members will pressure you to know why their remuneration and upward mobility prospects in the organisation are not equally glowing.

  • More generally, fear of falling out of favour with team members is the undertow holding team leaders back from attending to the quality of team task outcomes, as well as how individuals’ behaviour affected them.

– These are legitimate leadership responsibilities, even if an organisation prefers soft-touch leadership.

 Leaving some of your past behind involves loss and unavoidable emotional discomfort. Acknowledging and welcoming this opens the way to embracing your new relationship management role requirements.

Posted on by jtexecutivecoaching&businessadvisoryservices · 1 Comment

Team Leaders are Experiencing Dysfunctional Overload

What Can Managers Do to Support them Better?

Image courtesy of Francesco Ungaro

Since the 1990’s team leader (TL) roles have proliferated in companies. Teams have become a hub of organisational work activity and, together with their leaders, an indispensable means to adapt to mounting global competitiveness, through sourcing the most outstanding talent, no matter how geographically dispersed, to collaboratively solve customer problems more innovatively, cost-effectively and timeously. Recently, the most conspicuous demonstration of the benefits of collaborative team work has been in the pharmaceutical industry, which reduced the discovery to trial phase of COVID_19 vaccine development, by nearly two years, as compared with previous timelines.

From my experience with clients from companies across numerous sectors and four continents, it is evident that, irrespective of sector or continent, numerous companies have failed to notice organisational impediments their highly talented team leaders (TLs) face, to lead teams proficiently. TLs are showing warning signs of dysfunctional overload, induced by pressures of time and workload demands. These effects have intensified with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, creating upheaval in team functioning, and additional challenges, such as job and health anxieties of team members, as work from home is becoming the norm.

Crucially, these difficulties stem from unclarity about their roles and how they fit into the rest of the organisation. On a positive note, how organisations design TL roles, articulate their expectations of them, and support their incumbents, have a direct bearing on possibilities for TLs to bring their best qualities and performances to team situations they find themselves in.

If organisations are to leverage fully the promise of collaborative teamwork, there are three critical facets for managers to attend to.

1) Defining the Team Leader Role Unambiguously

Articulating what they expect of team leaders and how their work will contribute to organisations’ specific strategic goals are key questions to answer. Otherwise, how would managers assess fairly the outcomes produced by teams they lead, and the impact they have on the rest of the organisation?

When these issues remain open questions, puzzled TLs reach for the best explanations available to them, even if incomplete, when asked: ‘What does your manager expect of you?’ By way of example, ‘My manager says he wants nothing less than exceptional work from me’, ‘My manager assesses me on the quality of the team’s work and meeting deadlines.’ ‘My manager tells me I should learn to prioritise work better to produce what our company expects of me.’

Another difficulty they encounter, when role ambiguity prevails, is an inability to frame the tasks they are required to deliver in relation to their organisations’ strategic goals. Positive framing, which evokes meaningfulness and goal-directedness, is motivating to team members to engage with tasks and sustain effort. For the TL to effect collaborative outcomes valued by the organisation, and members to orientate themselves suitably to their leader and each other for this purpose, it is essential that both have clarity about the ambit of their respective roles.

Team Leader Add-On Roles

At one extreme we have functional specialists who have been asked by their managers to simply add on team leadership to their existing jobs demands, without any review of pre-existing task loads.

Their job titles change as a result. In reality little else does. They continue to concentrate on their functional specialist roles, eking out a minute percentage of their time and effort to allocate to team leadership. Inevitably, incumbents experience unmanageable emotional overloads.

Team Leader Technical Manager Roles

At the other extreme, TLs fulfil traditional technical managerial roles, eg. delegation, monitoring and management of work performance, conducting performance appraisals of team members, resolving team conflict and addressing non-performance.  At a comparatively younger age, what is demanded of them is far more involved than what fell to the traditional entry level managers.

2) Understanding How Team Leaders Accomplish Team Tasks

If managers paid more attention to how TLs perform their roles, they would discover what information is revealed about their developmental and support needs. This is a facet few managers have insight into, until the team overshoots deadlines and fails to meet tasks to their expectations. Even if there are no overt signs of under-performance, if team members are just going through the motions, there is a danger that they will be productive in the short-term only, and not produce their best sustained work.

The quality of interpersonal and team relationships can easily be assessed from team members’ feedback. Surprisingly, few companies assess these aspects systematically, and when managers do, they may skirt around giving what they see as negative feedback. As one Departmental Head, in a major European telecommunications company realised: ‘In my conversations with team leaders, the difficult issue hangs in the air, either because it appears contentious, or I am afraid to address it.’

3)  Recognising Team Leadership as an Organisational Rite of Passage

Assumption of a TL role represents a seismic shift from former functional specialist roles. Flattening the hierarchy makes this point no less pertinent. Progressing from managing ones’ own work outcomes, to managing and leading others for the first time, has always been a daunting prospect, even for the most talented employees. Being cognisant of this, in the traditional hierarchy, entry level managerial roles were commonly recognised as organisational passages requiring relatively more significant training and development resources, to improve job performance, especially in managing reporting individuals in their teams. The same consideration is not as widespread for team leadership, and role definition ambiguity contributes to this failure.

These are quite straightforward actions to take, which do not exceed the competence of any good, caring manager, to make team leadership more effective and rewarding for incumbents. Lack of concerted attentional focus to these basic managerial activities can be traced back to the prevailing tension in organisations between abdication of responsibility, and constraining autonomy through micro-managing. Direction setting is fundamental to leadership, and can be executed without dictating specific work content and processes, and undermining individual initiative and creativity.