Leadership Team Management

Just some tips and guidelines on how to lead an effective team.

Delegation

Leadership is about effective delegation; every good leader recognizes that they cannot do everything by themselves.

Effective delegation involves constant communication between the team leader and the person assigned to carry out a task — the task owner.

It is the team leader’s responsibility to ensure that the team member knows what is expected of them, how to complete their tasks, and where to ask for help.

It is the team member’s responsibility to raise any issues they are having, if they cannot continue to work on the task, and to ask for help if they need it.

Meetings

Holding regular meetings serves a dual purpose:

Facilitating discussions about tasks and any issues
Creating a system of accountability

An effective team brings up issues as early as possible, and meetings allow for team members to raise and talk about any issues they might be having.

An effective team also gets tasks done. Without an accountability system in place, it becomes easy for team members to avoid working on tasks for long stretches of time.

Setting up Meeting Times

Finding a meeting time that works for everyone is often challenging since everyone has different class schedule, work, and plans. It is up to the team leader to figure out a time that works for everyone one on the team — every team member is important to the team.

There are a few approaches to finding a common meeting time; my preferred method is using a spreadsheet with a timetable:

Everyone puts the times in which they are not available on the spreadsheet
You select an empty time-block

Otherwise, you can individually ask each team member and find which times work for everyone, or use tools like "doodle".

Running a Meeting

An important role of a team leader is to run effective meetings.

An effective meeting is:

Short
Team progress is known
Everyone walks away knowing what to do next

To run an effective meeting it is important to create a meeting agenda beforehand; this allows for the everyone to stay on track and know what to expect from the meeting. It also allows for event topics to be added to the meeting document beforehand so that nothing is missed.

One way to structure meetings is into these 3 parts:

Status Updates (3 min per person)
Discussion (15 min)
Next Steps (5 min)

Status Updates

In this part of the meeting each team member should quickly go over what they’ve done since the last meeting, and mention any issues they may be having. It is all too easy for this portion of the meeting to go longer than expected; it is everyone’s responsibility to stay on track, since it’s everyone time.

If someone is going off on a tangent, everyone should feel comfortable telling them to get back on track, since no one wants the meeting to become a 2 hour affair.

Discussion

During this period the team should discuss any issues and setbacks they’ve encountered, but if the discussion about a particular issue takes up too much time, perhaps it would make sense to continue the discussion after the meeting is over, or schedule a separate meeting specifically for this issue. Everyone should feel comfortable raising any issues or questions here.

Next Steps

At the end of every meeting everyone should know exactly what they need to do next. Each person should say which tasks they are working on, and how they plan on accomplishing it.

Assigning Tasks

In order for tasks to be completed, they need to be assigned to someone to work on them.

Any tasks that don’t get done, inevitably fall on the team leaders to complete; this often leads to far too much work on a few people. Organizing cuHacking is a team effort, and as such tasks should be distributed amongst all team members.

Owners

Every task — every card on trello — should have an owner, that is a single person responsible for the completion of said task. This person is responsible for making sure any issues blocking a task are raised, and rectified. The owner should not always be the team leader.

If the owner can no longer work on the task, or completed before a set deadline, the task can be reassigned to a new owner. The most important thing is that the task gets completed, not who completes it.

Bystander Effect

Oftentimes, it is easy to to @channel on slack and ask “who can complete this task?”. Unfortunately this usually does not work due to the bystander effect. Everyone assumes someone else will respond, but in the end no one does.

The best way to find someone to complete a task, is to ask them directly; this can be done in a private message on slack or using @name in your team channel.

Unresponsive Team Members

This is one of the greatest challenges for any leader. How do you motivate someone who seems to want to be part of the team, but doesn’t want to actually put the effort in?

From personal experience, the best way to overcome this is through communication. Talk to the team member in question and talk about the current situation.

Try and figure out why they are not able to fulfil their commitments
Make sure they know how to complete their tasks
Suggest a reduced commitment that works for them

Trello

Trello is a useful tool for tracking upcoming + ongoing tasks, next steps, and who they are assigned to.

Additional Resources

These are just some books, TED talks, and articles that I’ve found to be useful. The first step to becoming good at anything, is by being exposed to many ideas about how to do the thing.

Originally written by Federico Naranjo

Leadership Team Management

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