I have spent most of my work life getting people to think and work together. I do that from a personal belief that we’re all responsible for each other, all the time, when we’re part of a team of any kind – that can be at work, in a community, even a family or friend circle. That responsibility increases when you have more information than your team mates, whether formally (because you have a leadership position) or informally (because you know things), but it’s always there no matter what position or connection you have relative to the other people in your team.
One of the things I do for clients is help them apply all the lessons I’ve learned to their unique situations as leaders of agile organizations. Everyone has different versions of the same challenge as they navigate the responsibility of caring for and leading people: how to do it well.
I went looking for a guide for people who want to do better at that responsibility, whether by managing, mentoring or coaching others. I didn’t find that guide, so this is it.
There are many excellent definitions of leadership and management around (including a lot that center on perceived differences between “leading” and “managing”. I find it most useful to think of leadership as two helping tasks: helping people and teams do and be well and helping to define the work that needs to be done.
Defining the work
When we work together in teams and organizations, we need a sense of our goal (what we’re working for) the constraints we want to work within (our priorities, including what we aren’t doing) and the ways we work together. That doesn’t have to come from someone external; often teams are able to decide that among themselves. Even when it does come from within the team, there’s usually a trigger like a decision to be made or a conflict between priorities.
Taking that trigger, then helping a team make that decision together – that’s a form of people leadership.
If you agree to take on management of a team or a person, you accept on responsibility for helping them define their work. That does not mean supervising all of their tasks (*ahem*, that is micromanagement), but it does mean setting clear expectations – what’s most important for them to accomplish in their role, what problems need solving quickly, and what issues can wait for another time. One of the best managers I ever had listened to my list of “things on fire” every week, and helped me choose some things to let burn so that I could keep my focus on what mattered most.
Helping people do & be well
People like validation! We all appreciate confirmation that we’re doing the right thing, discovering how to improve, and even (although it can hurt in the moment) getting correction when we’re failing.
Giving others feedback in a way they can digest and use, helping them explore the path they could take, and sharing insights from your own experience – those are also forms of people leadership.
When you take on leadership roles, you’re also taking on a degree of responsibility to care for others, though what degree depends on your personal management style and how you view others. Some managers approach team members as autonomous collaborators; some managers treat team members as with great care and focus the decision-making on the team’s well-being. Many different management styles (here’s a list of often-used style definitions, none of them bad) can work for different teams and circumstances.
No matter your style, helping others do well requires curiosity about who they are and what they want, grounded optimism about what they can achieve right now, and honesty about the behavior you see from them. Helping them be well – caring for their well-being – draws on the same emotional intelligence.
But what if you’re not in a “people leadership” or “management” role?
None of these tasks of leadership require you to be in a management role relative to the people you’re offering leadership to. We’re all helping to lead each other all the time – and I would argue we all owe each other, at minimum, decency and support.
You still lead others when you share knowledge, inspire them with ideas and questions, or influence them with opinions. My friend and colleague Amy points out that “individual contributor” is a counterproductive term, because almost none of us get things done as individuals; we’re really team contributors.
More on that next time, when I talk about the different kinds of people leaders.