Building Competence & Confidence in your Team
Seeking to elevate your leadership? Discover how empowering your team's skills and self-assurance can create the time you need to lead effectively.
One of our key roles as managers/leaders is to build competence and confidence across our team. We’re responsible for helping our team members move from bottom left to top right (see graph below).
There are four broad quadrants people might be in. Some may be in the same quadrant for every task. More likely they’re in different quadrants for different tasks.
So how can we spot which quadrant someone’s in, particularly in a hybrid world, where we may not see people so often?
✋ Low Competence & Low Confidence - Quiet in meetings, no camera, store up lots of questions for 1:1, poor and/or slow output.
🤷♂️ Low Competence & High Confidence - ‘Talk the talk’, give reassurance without evidence, resistant to questions on detail and progress.
💡 High Competence & Low Confidence - Do a great job and don’t recognize this. Don’t put themselves forward. Need reassurance. Ask questions they could answer themselves.
🌟 High Competence & High Confidence - They deliver, may be looking for next challenge.
So what do different people need from their line manager? Here are some ideas. What others do you have?
How often do you find yourself bogged down in day-to-day tasks, at the expense of the longer-term, strategic tasks? It’s a challenge commonly raised during coaching. The "Lead, Manage, Do" model helps us consider where our efforts are best invested.
🎯 Where You Are vs. Where You Could Be
When we’re more junior, we do a lot of the ‘doing’. As we take on management responsibilities we do less ‘doing’ and more ‘leading’ and ‘managing’. That’s the theory anyway!
In reality, as leaders, it's easy to get drawn down into those everyday tasks, ie the ‘Doing’. This reduces our capacity to be proactive, and to 'Lead' and ‘Manage’. What are some reasons for this?
We’re short-staffed
Find it hard to delegate, saying to ourselves: ‘If you want a job done properly do it yourself’
Unclear objectives
Poor performance in the team
We prefer ‘doing the doing’
Which of these resonates with you?
🔍How can we break out of this?
By training, coaching, and empowering our team to handle the ‘Doing’, we create time to lead and manage the team. It can be hard to find this time, especially in the short term. We may need to front-load this investment of time in the short term to gain longer-term benefits.
Questions to consider: Where do you spend your time?
What one task could you delegate to a team member now to free you up for 1 hour/week?
How about next month? What task could you delegate to give you another 1 hour/week?
What would you do with those 2 hours?
In my next post, we’ll explore delegation in more detail.
Transitioning from ‘doing’ to ‘leading’ can be challenging at any level. Contact me if you’d like to discuss how execuctive coaching or leadership training for you or your teams could support you with this.