You have worked with others as a team at some point in your life and career. You are likely familiar with how teams successfully deliver on a mission or a goal that the whole team had set. You get your hands dirty altogether and look-up to who is in charge of guidance, purpose and protection.

You dedicate yourself for the good of the team, but who can help you stretch out of your objectives and passions to meet what the need of the team is? Abandoning our self-interest even for a bit makes us vulnerable, and put us at risk. We do so because we understand there is a higher purpose we can achieve, but also because we feel protected. Team leaders provide the very first level of protection that frees us up to accomplish beyond our individual goals and creates team bonding. In this article, I want to share my experience with what worked well for me and helped me protect my teams.

Filters and ladders

As a leader, the most basic level of protection you may think is putting yourself as a proxy. Be a proxy between your team and the outside world. It means interjecting communications, email, escalations, problems and at the same time, be the spokesperson of the group. For as simple as it looks, these mechanisms allow you to go a long way. They are easy to understand (the manager needs to know, the manager speaks for me) and easy to implement (like in the army: it is a simple top-down rule to follow). You likely worked in teams where your manager acts as a proxy for all communications. You are therefore familiar with some of the downsides: working as a proxy creates points of disconnection. The information shared from the outside world, from the top management of the company, is filtered, possibly changed and not any more transparent. Same goes for the successes of the team: will my contributions be recognised? Will my manager steal all the credits? All these questions lead to problems, misunderstandings and team discontent.

Managers need to remember why protection is necessary if they want to avoid incurring in these issues. Unity of the team requires protection to be effective. Security is essential to allow the team to move with a single identify, taking risks, get empowered and stop worrying about our failures as individuals. I group the mechanisms to create protection into two main buckets: filters and ladders.

Filters: A filter is an action that the manager can take to reduce the level of noise, the distraction. An example is acting as a single escalation point: a customer is angry because a product is not working. Passing along anger won’t help the issue getting solved earlier but only spread more tensions. What should the team know? A filter is useful when a given process or communication has proven inefficient in the past. When having a single point of reference will enable others to free-up time and keep focusing on the problems at hand. Filters are active if something can be taken away and have a positive impacton how the team operates together. How often are these filters the right solution? It all depends on the challenge. Running an airport control tower will surely require many more filters to ensure all traffic controllers can work together. Building a software application where requirements keep changing by the day, will profit from the minimum number of filters possible.

Ladders: We said that to abandon our self-centric views and act on behalf of the team, we need to feel protected and reassured that it is safe to do it. Ladders are those mechanisms that help individuals become owners, with the respect and recognition of the team. Ladders empower responsibility and bypass filters, proxies, managers. If you are the account manager for one of your client, you are ultimately responsible for your company in front of the customer. You take ownership of the successes and shortcomings of your product (or your company) and do not deflect problems on others behind you. If you are the tech leader of a product, you help coordinate the design and implementation on behalf of your team. You act as the single-threaded owner for that and speak-up when changes need to happen. A ladder is a mechanism to empower individuals to represent the team and reach out of the team’ sphere of influence.

What are your transparent rules?

We talked about protection as a way to facilitate collaboration and safety; but aren’t there any advantages for the ones outside the team? What about their needs and how efficiently they work with the team? An example is the leadership team of a company. They may need to access data and business results that the team produces. How being protective can help that? Protection works well only with established rules for transparency. A transparent rule is what we use to make stakeholders aware of how the team operates and delivers. Leaders share these rules with whoever needs to know more about what the team is doing. They act on how to engage with them, and when. Reducing the volume of information, summarising it, having a crisp and clear message, are all transparent rules to facilitate the need for information. They build trust as they better explain how the team works together. Have well defined transparent rules reduces the distractions and help the team better understand the expectations.

Protection is not a shield

Leaders may see security as a way to create barriers. Behind these shields, the team feels comfortable and hides away from the problems, office politics, distractions. Adequate protection is not a shield to wield in preparation of a battle, and leaders need to remember it to the team.

As a leader, do not corner your team in isolation. Be the catalyst for a cleaner, organised and non-abrasive communication: within and outside the group. With clear ownership, there is less need for distances, and you can build ladders that link people together, creating connections.

Every person in the team participates with different skills, ideas, energy and effort. Remember that a diverse group brings diverse perspectives to the problems at hand and might not be optimal for “doing all the same thing”. Think about these differences when deciding who will own what in your team. What is the best match for a given project? What will make the team thrive, who will inspire them? Create a productive and happy team, is a much harder problem, but start with a clear idea of what protections you need and which ones will help. Why do you need them? Who will suffer if you are wrong? Protecting your team may be natural when creating your community, but also a delicate balance that is specific to the diverse composition of people.

Thank you

Thank you for reading my story. I hope you enjoyed the tips and leave your comments and suggestions to make this better. How do you protect your teammates?

Simone

Photo by James Pond on Unsplash