Leading is a Two-Way Street
Responsibilities of Leaders 🏆
Leaders play a pivotal role in guiding their teams toward success. Their responsibilities encompass:
- Clearly Define the Problem: Leaders must articulate the customer problem they want the team to solve and explain how it aligns with the broader organizational strategy and vision.
- Express Impact: Leaders should vividly convey the impact the right solution will have on the customer and business.
- Set Success Metrics: Aligning around measurable metrics ensures everyone knows what success looks like and allows for tracking progress.
Effective Communication 🗣️
Teams can struggle due to ineffective communication from leaders. To address this, leaders must:
- Ensure teams fully understand objectives and desired outcomes.
- Empower teams to make evidence-based decisions to determine the best solution that delivers value to the customer and business.
Handling New Priorities 🔄
When new priorities emerge, leaders must communicate any change clearly and concisely. Teams need to understand the rationale behind the shift to embrace it wholeheartedly.
Responsibilities of Teams 🛠️
Teams also bear significant responsibilities:
- Leverage Information: Dive deep into existing data and conduct thorough discovery to understand the customer problem.
- Mitigate Risks: Identify and test critical assumptions to minimize potential risks.
- Gather Evidence: Collect evidence to determine the fastest path to customer and business value.
Demo Cadence 🔄
Teams should proactively schedule demos to report progress using success metrics. During these sessions with leaders and stakeholders, share learnings, evidence, and data-driven decisions that bring you closer to desired outcomes.
Mutual Accountability 🤝
Leadership and teams share accountability. Leaders can’t fully grasp team challenges without being invited in. Teams must:
- Invite Leaders In: Show leaders the blockers and frustrations hindering progress.
- Ask for Help: Clearly articulate where help is needed.
Now that leaders understand the team’s needs, they are accountable for supporting and clearing the path.
Building a Bridge of Trust 🏗️
Both teams and leaders have a responsibility to each other. Leaders aim to set up and support teams for success, and teams strive to achieve the desired outcomes.
Everyone is working with the best information they have at that moment. When issues arise and communications break down, they must both take responsibility to improve and build a bridge of trust.
Leading is a two-way street that creates shared understanding and alignment where leaders, teams, and the organization can thrive by solving crucial problems and delivering customer and business value.
Written by: Pam Krengel