Feedback: Too Trusting of Team
As a leader, if someone on your team told you:
You’re too trusting of the team
Would you consider that to be a good thing or a bad thing?
This is why I like the two plus and two delta format, because the team member told me this comment after giving me two pluses.
So, this was definitely a topic I can improve on.
A Manager’s Output
As a manager, my output is the team’s output - not my own. Once I became manager, I forfeit my output being my own effort and depend on the team.
I need to trust the team to deliver or I will always just be a contributor.
How did this Happen?
Change is the only constant, and in this case, the changes were exciting on multiple fronts.
- new project
- new tech stack
- inherited code base
- new product manager
- and a new team member on loan.
Top it off, two team members want to change to software engineers - perfect because were still back filling previous departures. (Did I forget to mention, we’re hiring??)
I want to take advantage of all of these changes in order to move fast. I also want the team to take more ownership as well.
By this, I trust them to figure all of these things out. Common sense, right??
Realization
Well, after hearing that feedback in my two pluses and two deltas session, I knew I had a problem:
- What I was doing isn’t common sense.
- The team wasn’t moving as fast as they wanted.
- Increasing team ownership isn’t as easy as “letting the team figure it out.”
Things I have already done:
- I am slowing down and working with the team to rebuild our foundation. I got this from a talk Robert Martin gave on test driven development:, “If you want to go fast, you have to go slow”.
- I’m practicing to give context to my advice. The 80/20 Rule, isn’t common sense.
- Work with team on them taking on smaller tasks, giving feedback on what I expect of those tasks, and working with them when their results don’t match my expectations.
Where to Next?
This is a work in progress. In either case, this piece of feedback from my two pluses and two deltas session is invaluable. By hearing it from my team directly, I can start to address the problem now, not later. I save myself a situation where the team raises these issues in another format or audience.