The Top 10 Tips for Team Leadership

There is a lot written about leadership and quite frankly most of it isn't too helpful. In some ways leadership is a fairly simple proposition as long as you approach it in a straightforward manner. Like most things, being an effective leader involves following a consistent and concise set of principles. I suppose you could list hundreds of these guidelines but the reality is you only need a handful – and of course only having a few ensures that you’ll probably remember them when you need to.

Knowing which way to go - how does one achieve it?

In information Technology, the most important leadership role isn't generally the CIO; it starts at a much lower level – with a team. Teams can exhibit the following characteristics:

• Teams can be formal or informal.
• Teams can be large (perhaps extending to hundreds of members) or very small – say 3 people.
• Teams can be local or geographically distributed across the globe. 
• Teams can be open-ended, project-based or problem-focused – the latter two imply definite end dates which when reached results in disbanding the group. 
• Teams can be business-focused, technology-focused or both. 
• Teams can be focused with solution definition or solution development or both.
• Teams can be targeted to organizational segments or divisions/departments or can be enterprise-wide in nature.
• Teams can be productive or distracting.

The last point of course is generally due to whether or not the team has an effective leader.

The top ten tips for effective team leadership include:

1. Efficient Facilitation – This needs to be explained a bit. The fact that a team is communicating is not enough – the communication occurring needs to be productive communication. To be productive – communication generally needs to be framed or directed. This begins when the group is launched but must continue for the life of the group. Yes, it’s somewhat like moderation and for a globally team there may be a lot of moderation involved. But, usually there is some direct interaction between the participants and directed communication goes well beyond typical moderation tasks. Facilitation also includes the ability to elicit the participation of the team members and the ability to keep their motivation level high.
2. Willingness to Delegate – This is one of the first and worst mistakes that new managers or leaders tend to make. People who have a lot of expertise in an area are often very self-reliant and like to get things done on their own without the hassle of dealing with some type of workgroup. However, if you’re doing all the work yourself then you in effect don’t really have a team.
3. Being able to identify Key Issues– Being able to determine what is and what isn't important is harder than it seems. When dealing with a group, some things may be very important to certain people and not at all important to others. The team leader must determine what is important for the group as a whole to tackle that within the defined context of the group’s charter. 
4. The Ability to Make Decisions - This tip is a little bit tricky as it refers not just to the leader’s ability to make decisions but for the group’s ability to do so. In general, it’s not very effective for the team leader to make all of the decisions on behalf of the group. On the other hand, a team that can’t decide anything has little value. 
5. The Ability to Achieve Consensus– This is not just limited to the group. Generally a team must reconcile its efforts with other external groups; this can be especially problematic in situations where your team is dependent on other groups. 
6. Demonstrate the Ability to Compromise – This sounds like we’re talking about Congress and in fact that might be a good metaphor for a team – or perhaps a dysfunctional one. There will always be situations where a team may be driven by competing needs or motivations; in those cases compromise is the difference between having a productive team or not. The team leader must be able to compromise themselves before asking anyone else to compromise.  
7. Have a sufficient level of subject matter expertise in the area where you’re leading – This is one tip some might find controversial. However this advice makes perfect sense if you think about it for a moment. Without having some level of expertise in the subject it will become difficult for a team leader to facilitate the meeting, identify key issues and make key decisions. It places the team leader in a vulnerable position in that he or she must become highly dependent on other team members to carry out the basic leadership functions. 
8. Be a Peacemaker – As a team leader, you may have to respond to situations where one or more of the group members becomes disruptive or tries to dominate the conversation. This requires some political skill in being able to redirect the group when it gets sidetracked and in being able to defuse potentially tense situations. There are any number of techniques that can be used to achieve those goals, but of course the team leader must know when and how to apply them. It is also important to remember that sometimes in order to maintain peace, someone will need to adjust their behavior – in other words, peace at any cost is not a good policy – sometimes participants will be unhappy by the result or have to leave the team. Don’t be afraid to make the tough decisions in a timely manner.
9. Excel in Time Management – This is related to many of the tips already listed but has its own dimension as well. Teams that work well generally work to deadlines and tend to utilize every moment of meeting time wisely. The team leader sets all these types of expectations in the way the meeting is run, how it is planned and how all tasks related to the meeting are coordinated with the group’s overall mission.
10. Demonstrate The ability to acknowledge contributions – The whole point of a team, any team is to harness the collective value of its members. This involves both being able to recognize individual contributions as well as the synergistic output of the combined group. This requires the ability to submerge one’s own ego and focus on harvesting the best ideas in a completely objective manner. 

These tips can be applied to just about any type of team or project context. They seem like common sense yet it is remarkable how few team leaders actually practice all ten of these capabilities consistently. It’s often easy to get caught up in the issues your team is tasked to solve and forget about the processes necessary to ensure that the team actually succeeds.


Copyright 2013, Stephen Lahanas

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Redefining the Chief Innovation Officer

The role of Chief Innovation Officer has been around for more than a decade but it hasn’t been universally adopted yet across most organizations. In fact, there is quite a bit of confusion as to how the CTO, CIO (information officer), Strategy and Innovation ought to relate to one another. Many organizations combine all these roles within the Chief Information Officer job description. While combining the CTO and CIO roles together makes sense, adding strategy and innovation to the duties for one role is much less effective for the following reasons:

1. Because in most cases it simply adds too much workload to one person.
2. Because a CIO/CTO is often siloed off away from top leadership or the business community. This happens because many organizations want the CIO/CTO to focus solely on delivering IT capability rather than helping to define how technology may help the organization evolve.
3. Because innovation is often directly at odds with management of existing technology. In other words, in some cases the IT department is the group least open to adopting innovations.

Another big problem with the role of Chief Innovation Officer (besides the fact that it shares the same acronym as the Chief Information Officer) is that the fact there is no standard industry definition for what it encompasses. Many of the definitions out there today are somewhat contradictory and worse yet most of them are incredibly vague when it comes to defining what duties this role would perform. I’m hoping to help correct that with the following definition (we’ll start by changing the acronym):

Chief (or Director) of Innovation (CI) - The Chief of Innovation is responsible for facilitating the convergence and evolution of business goals with technical capability. The CI acts as a liaison and link between the business and IT groups within the enterprise. The CI helps to define strategy, envision solutions and facilitate complex initiatives. The specific duties of the CI include the following:

• Definition of Techno-functional strategy and Vision Statement/s. 
• Alignment of business objectives to enterprise roadmaps.
• Product Definition and Design. (this can include internal or external capabilities that aren't marketed as products)
• Management of an organizational “Continuous Innovation” process (includes Ideation - I will write a post about this soon).
• Research and Development planning & oversight.
• Industry-level coordination and outreach. (for all things innovation-related)
• Start-up management or facilitation (for initiatives groups, products etc.)

The CI role probably also requires us to define what we mean by Innovation in an enterprise context:

Innovation is the set of technology-driven activities or capabilities that represent revolutionary or potentially disruptive improvements in business practice. This implies that ordinary improvements such as adding new servers (similar to those already present), or upgrading software that is already owned is not innovation per se but rather represents steady state enhancements.  

Innovation tends to go hand in hand with one or more organizational Transformations. Transformations can be business or technology-focused or both. An example of a transformation might be moving from custom software to a packaged ERP solution or integrating all the organization's social media-related capabilities into a unified digital presence. Each of these examples would have profound impacts on the nature of the business (in terms of what it could accomplish and how it interacts with its consumers). 

You’ll note that I have linked all Innovation to Technology. The reason for this is simple – it is almost impossible to envision any significant innovation today without technology playing a major role in it. The Chief of Innovation role will become increasingly important in coming years. The CI is in effect the Chief Incubator – the change agent for the organization and potentially the one who demonstrates proofs of concepts. The CI is not constrained by IT’s perceived limitations but also can temper business zeal with a pragmatic understanding of can or can’t be accomplished.

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