How to start Leading a team 👩‍💻👨‍💻

🐴 Are we putting the cart before the horse?

When I first started to manage a small five people team, my HR business partner suggested to get a copy of The First 90 Days, a great business book on how to start in a new role.

It had some great tips and advice, but it focused mostly on strategy and plans, versus what I felt was more important - How the hell do I become a team manager overnight?

Too often do new people managers take for granted/skip the team management part, sometimes for lack of interest, sometimes for pressure to get results, sometimes for lack of better alternatives.

So this creates a classic ‘putting the cart before the horse’ problem - it’s only having the right team in place you can get results.

But if you’re inheriting an existing group of people, what should you be doing?

📊 1. Gather the data

The first step is to have all historic and current information on each and every member of your team. You can do this by:

1. 🗣️Get feedback - from other team members

2. 📝Get past performance reviews

3. ⌛Invest time - Setting-up a long ‘get-to-know’ 1-1 which will then become a regular weekly meeting

📖 2. Present Yourself

Before starting to ask questions, you need to show that you are not doing a police interrogation, and are ready to share more about yourself both professionally and personally.

Some things to consider:

• Your life story - a short version of it

• Your career story - think of it a little bit like a job interview - what went well? what didn’t?

• Your management and communication style - some people suggest building out a tutorial for this - it may not be always a great idea but it is definitely worth figuring it out and sharing some key items

🙋3. Ask the right Questions

You’re laying a map of the territory - so you need to focus on asking a few but key questions, like:

• What do you like doing and what do you not like doing in the role? - this way you can start to figure out who is motivated, who isn’t any most of all why

• What works and what doesn’t work in the team and in the company? - a general temperature check which is useful to cross-check between different members

• What are the most frequent issues and what happens when they arise - to see if you can categorize them and find solutions to address them

• How are you spending your time - to get an idea of what is requiring effort and what could be optimized

🗺️ 4. Map out Processes and Communication

It’s key to understand also where and why things are happening:

• Interactions - who is the team talking most & least to?

• Processes - what are the existing processes that the team needs to follow?

👷5. Review Roles & Responsibilities

In many experiences I’ve had there was a problem of not sufficient clarity in the team’s roles - i.e. what is expected of them. You can achieve this by:

• Job Descriptions - make sure each type of role in each team and seniority is well described and documented so it can be referred to

• Apply a decision-making framework - a good one is RACI (stands for ‘Responsible’, ‘Accountable’, ‘Consulted’, ‘Informed’) so you can always know who needs to be involved when, and eradicate unnecessary complexity or confusion

These are the 5 steps to get to know the team - in Part 2 we will start to cover the Plan of Action.

Ciao! 👋 I’m Matteo, thanks for reading!

I’m on a journey to take learnings from my 13+ year experience in career management, job hunting and digital marketing. I publish them as advice for those just starting or following a similar path.

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