Learn how to adapt your leadership style to your team’s current phase

Photo by Desola Lanre-Ologun on Unsplash

As a Tech Lead, one of my biggest questions involved how to help my team:

• How can I best help my team?
• What do they need most from me right now?
• How can I best support them as they overcome their current challenges?

As a Tech Coordinator who supports and develops other Tech Leads, I realized these questions are not solely mine.

Then, I came across the intriguing concepts presented in the book Elastic Leadership: Growing Self-organizing Teams by Roy Osherove. This book describes how teams can go through three modes or phases:

• Survival Mode
• Learning Mode
• Self-Organizing Mode

Each phase has a different objective and requires a different leadership style. Identifying your team’s current phase gives you clear direction on how to best support it.

Identifying the team’s phase

To identify the phase of the team, we must consider two main factors:

1. The team’s knowledge and ability to solve its problems

• What level of autonomy does the team have to understand and face challenges in their daily tasks? Does it demonstrate the ability to solve problems independently?
• How is the team’s internal communication regarding its challenges and problems, and how does this affect its ability to be self-sufficient and use the time available?

2. The amount of time available to the team (slack time)

• How much time is the team available for activities other than the main, urgent tasks?
• Do they have time to explore new ideas, experiment with new approaches, or engage in professional development activities?
• Do team members report feeling overwhelmed or stressed due to a lack of time to complete their tasks effectively?

This approach allows us to better understand the team’s needs and adapt our leadership style to better meet those needs at different development stages.

In the image below, you can see each phase with its characteristics and the objective of each one:

Adapting your leadership style to the team’s current phase

1. Survival Mode

The team has no time to study and can’t solve their problems

In Survival Mode, the team has no time to learn, consistently puts out fires, and is often late and overworked. To get your team out of this phase, creating more free space for them is essential. To do this, you must take action using a leadership style based on Command and Control.

Command-and-control leadership

In this model, you must act actively and closely with the team to provide direction. It’s also important to work with each individual at their best. There is no time to make mistakes!

When the ship is sinking, the captain doesn’t call a meeting. The captain gives orders.

It’s important to note that getting out of this phase takes work, so your negotiating skills will be fundamental to getting everyone involved to embrace the idea.

Some practices you can adopt to free up time for the team:

• Renegotiate deadlines and priorities: regularly assess project deadlines and priorities with stakeholders and, if necessary, renegotiate them to ensure they are realistic and achievable. This practice allows the team to handle unrealistic deadlines.
• Filter meetings and events: assess the need for each meeting or event and eliminate those not essential to the project’s progress. This includes canceling unproductive meetings, consolidating similar meetings, and limiting attendance to only necessary team members.
• Set aside protected time for high-impact tasks (focus moments): Dedicate blocks of time for high-impact, complex tasks where team members can concentrate without interruption. This practice helps maximize productivity and the quality of the work done.
• Monitor and manage workloads: keep track of the team’s workloads regularly and intervene when necessary to redistribute tasks or adjust deadlines to avoid overload.

2. Learning Mode

The team has time to study and is learning to solve its problems

In this phase, the team has time off and uses it deliberately to learn new skills and deepen knowledge. Here, taking calculated risks is allowed because time is not an issue. In this phase, the team needs a Leadership Coach.

Leadership Coach

In Learning Mode, you must teach the team to solve their problems, mentoring and challenging them to develop solutions. Here, you ask questions and give the team space to develop solutions.

Stop solving everyone else’s problems and start mentoring and challenging them to solve their own.

Questions you can ask team members when faced with a challenge:

1. What is the specific challenge you are facing?
2. How significant is this problem to you and the team/organization?
3. What is the desired result you hope to achieve?
4. What solutions or approaches have you considered?
5. What are the pros and cons of each option?
6. Is there anything you believe could impede progress?
7. How do you plan to approach the problem practically?
8. Can we break the plan down into manageable steps?
9. What could be a first step towards solving this problem?
10. How would you like to be responsible for progress?
11. What specific actions are you committed to taking?
12. How often should we meet to follow up on your progress?
13. What can you learn from solving this problem?
14. How can we ensure that we apply this learning in future situations?
15. Is there anything you would have liked to have done differently after solving this problem?

3. Self-Organization Mode

Facilitation/experimentation

A self-organized team works independently of you, the leader, when making decisions and moving forward productively. The leader is not essential for delivering, nor do they act as a decision bottleneck because the team has enough capacity and context to make its own decisions. The people have enough knowledge and skills to solve the difficulties they encounter. Here, the leader can be away for a week, and the team’s rhythm doesn’t change.

The aim is to keep the team operating as much as possible in this mode. For that, you need Facilitative Leadership.

Facilitative Leadership

A Facilitating Leader listens actively to seek understanding, asks questions, and, if necessary, paraphrases what they have just heard to confirm understanding. In facilitation, the leader acts by providing clarity and purpose; they identify the problem that needs to be solved, ask questions, and seek answers to:

• Why are we doing this?
• Where are we trying to go?
• Do you know what you’re trying to achieve?
• Does the team see the goal?

In facilitation, the leader influences collaboration. This practice involves getting all team members to work together to solve problems and managing contrasting perspectives and opinions to minimize friction between group members.

Facilitative leaders manage contrasting perspectives and opinions to minimize conflict between group members. For example, they design inclusive group processes that honor individuals’ different learning and participation styles, making room for quieter individuals.

Conclusion

Of course, this model only fits some contexts. Still, it’s interesting to get to know it to expand your toolbox as a Tech Lead and thus help your team achieve its objectives.

Have you identified your team in any of these phases? What did you think of these concepts? Let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear your point of view! :)

Originally published in: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/elastic-leadership-adaptando-o-modo-de-liderar-para-fase-soares/?trackingId=enGr9YkfQZ6bSDJPLe%2B%2FJw%3D%3D