Success comes from what the team can achieve. But the team is powered by individuals, who might be ON a team, but not part of it. The goal then becomes to make every individual part of the team, beyond simply being ON the team. Once they realize they are part of something bigger, the path to their own personal growth becomes aligned with what the team wants and can potentially achieve.
When you describe the team you are leading, do you talk in the I or the We? If you talk in the I, then you are not leading a team, you are leading yourself. When you talk about We, you are talking about the team. Managers talk about the I, Leaders talk about the We.
There are places, everywhere in what you are doing where leaders are needed. It doesn’t need to be the next big assignment or that massive project coming down the pipe. It can be fixing the bugs sitting in triage. It can be suggesting a field to simplify the approach to creating stories. It can be creating a dashboard that shows what is happening in your group. We need leaders everywhere, we just don’t have enough…
If you’re leading a team, there is only what the team has accomplished. There is no “I” that has been done. Everyone contributed in some fashion – whether freeing you up to do that work, doing the leg work for that work, taking on extra bugs so you could focus, or not disturbing you while you did all that work. They might not have banged out all the code, but what they did do is…
When the team knows the play, they know what to do without even thinking about it. If one person changes the play without letting the rest of the team know, the team is lost and doesn’t know what to do. Changing the play is good, but if you’re changing it all the time and not telling everyone, you’re not running a play, you’re simply running wild.