A friend of mine called recently to discuss his business. He wants his employees to assume more ownership for their work and take more initiative on their own, without having to be asked to do something. He wants to lead an organization that produces innovative leaders, not a bunch of managed followers. Knowing a little about his workplace, I asked him an important question. “Have you created an environment conducive to produce the kind of employees you say you want?â€
One absolute necessity for effectively leading a growing environment is the art of delegation. The leader who fails to delegate will inhibit growth of the organization and stifle leadership development of the team.
Titles to me are too specific. They seem to indicate a defined area of focus. I realize some people need that for clarity, but I prefer a job description to a title. I like for a person to understand the goals and objectives for the position, and even more than that, the overall vision of the organization and for them to realize how they are part of the organization’s success. That is hard to capture in a specific job title.
This can be a controversial principle, because it appears at first glance that an organization is strategizing to leave a group of people out of the equation, but really this strategy helps the entire organization be more successful, eventually improving things for everyone involved in the organization, even those in the last 20%. This principle assumes that in any organization:
With the process of inviting our staff to evaluate my leadership two things needing improvement in our organization were clearly evident. My current thought is that these two things apply to every organization that desires to function effectively as a team.
If you are following this series you know that I invited our staff to evaluate my leadership. As I said in Part 1 of this follow-up series, we gathered for lunch after a regularly scheduled staff meeting. Essentially the luncheon was to accomplish three things.
Last month I posted about my invitation to our staff to evaluate my performance as a leader. You can read that post HERE. I promised to do a follow up post with their input. This will actually end up being more than one post, because of length.
I have asked our staff to evaluate me. Using Google documents, I set up group for our staff and me and then placed a document in the group just for this evaluation. I then invited the staff to participate anonymously. Here is what I posted. I will let you know their responses good and bad. (unless they cuss a lot!)
This is a random post, but I was thinking about leadership again today. There are many leaders I know who certainly have responsibility for an organization, but I wouldn’t necessarily consider them “good leadersâ€. (This is not aimed at anyone specific; so don’t read it as such. If the shoe fits…)
What is your definition of a team player? Over the years, I have discovered that not everyone defines “team player†the same. There appears to be two almost bipolar understandings of the term. This difference existed when I was in the business world and it continues now that I am in professional ministry work.
