White paper

One of the most demotivating and value-destroying perceptions for any team is to start to think of themselves as “B List Personnel”. A related but slightly different malaise is when people believe that what they’re working on isn’t important. Your behaviours need to demonstrate at all times that you see each team and its individual [...]

Moving from the leadership of one team to several almost inevitably means that you will need to lift your own level of daily engagement up a functional level. Trying to ‘micro-manage’ is never advisable, as it suggests a lack of confidence in your colleagues and team members but it also becomes increasingly impossible when you’re [...]

Leaders can become very shadowy and increasingly irrelevant figures for teams who rarely see or hear from them. Remember that a leader’s contributions are always assessed by others, be they ‘superiors’ or ‘subordinates’ in old hierarchal terms. Put more simply, with multiple teams it’s very important to not [...]

Few of us are gifted with infallible memories. Time and activity management (both personal and that of your teams) can quickly become far too complex to ‘do in your head’ in the context of multiple teams. There are some excellent project/team management technologies out there and they should be used to help.   [...]

  This is very important where your teams are operating in vertical silos. Two or three teams may believe that there are few horizontal opportunities for synergy in their activities and they may also have little or no cross-team interest in what’s going on elsewhere. That’s potentially dangerous and inhibits your ability [...]