When you look at a team, you have to look at the potential, where they are, where they could go, what they can accomplish, what they can achieve, what they are made of, and what someday, at some point, together they will do. If you start with that point of reference in your mind, you can take them anywhere.
Everything can’t be a Priority 1, that’s like saying, every day is Christmas, it can’t be, it’s impossible. Instead, you have to make the hard choices of 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5… And that’s where the triaging of priority falls apart either because we can’t choose what the 1 is and want to label everything a 1. Knowing whether you’ve chosen the wrong priority is a pretty simple exercise – if it changes every…
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…