1,000 Bridges…
I closed my last article like this with an example of how anyone with even a reasonable amount of influence, good or bad, can impact the overall direction of a team. And in that particular scenario I detailed, the person who had the influence and did more than his share of steering the ship carried no positional authority at all. If anything, he was more focused on sinking the boat we were in than guiding it up the stream toward the departmental goals our supervisor was responsible for seeing accomplished…
While that fellow, we’ll call him Tim, didn’t seem to have any intention at all of making a positive impact, he had earned influence with most of the people in our department. And even though we all liked our new supervisor, being a nice guy and earning influence are two very different things!
Earning influence, especially the kind of influence we need for effective team leadership, requires time and effort. Much like building a solid reputation, which actually happens as a result of earning influence, we’ll be required to go above and beyond what’s written in our job description - regardless of the job title we currently hold! But make no mistake, cutting even a single corner can be catastrophic!
In early 2015, I was doing a new employee orientation along with my boss at the time. In that particular company, we were required to provide eight full hours of industry specific safety training before a new team member could enter the work area by themselves. As you can probably imagine, eight hours of training on any topic all at once is a tough pill to swallow but that much time, on top of an hour or two filling out the regular new hire paperwork, ranks right up there with waterboarding… That said, we did everything we possibly could to make it tolerable.
At some point during that process, we were discussing how critical it would be for this new team member to build strong relationships with the team since they’d be relying on him heavily every single day. That’s when my boss, who had recently separated from service with the United States Marine Corps, explained that “you can build 1,000 bridges and never be known as a bridge builder but if you (do one particular thing) just once…” He didn’t say one particular thing though. Woody Harrelson made a similar comment in a movie once, but my boss’s explanation was a bit more direct - and definitely something I had never heard in a new hire orientation before - but he certainly made an effective case for the importance of being someone the team could count on for what they needed!
When it comes to the importance of team leadership, earning influence is an absolute must if we want to make a lasting impact on the employee engagement or even the profitability of the organization that we’ve looked at so far. With that in mind, let’s start looking at the specific things we need to exhibit if we have any hope of building that kind of influence.
Are You “Countable”?
In The 17 Indispensable Laws of Teamwork, John Maxwell coined the idea of “countability” in chapter 9. He explains the Law of Countability by saying that “Teammates must be able to count on each other when it counts!” And if we ever want to be known as a bridge builder, the same thing better hold true! Anyone crossing the bridges we’ve built has to be able to count on the effort we’ve put into making sure they can cross safely…
When we’re a member of a team, countability is critical to developing strong relationships with our teammates and creating a high performing atmosphere. But if we’re in a position where we hold responsibility for leading that team, or if we’re even working to earn the kind of influence that allows us to lead from wherever we are on the team, we have to take our countability to a whole new level!
For a large part of my career, I held positions where nearly every action I took or decision I made had potential to impact one person positively and the person right beside them negatively. That taught me to be very cautious in making each decision, which was often stinking tall order for someone with such a highly Driven and Decisive behavioral style. Regardless of how hard I would work at not offending any one person with my actions or decisions, it still happened. And in those cases, where I was called on the proverbial carpet to explain why something I had done seemed to show preference to one team member while slighting another, I had to have my reasons detailed to show that my decision was in line with existing precedence; I had to exhibit consistency in everything I did! Even then, there were plenty of times where being consistent still wasn’t viewed as being fair…
To that end, I’ve never been willing to interview close friends or family members for positions I help any of our clients fill. Our son has one of the strongest work histories of anyone I’ve seen in their mid 20s but I still exclude myself from doing anything more than passing along his resume. In the roles I’ve held, I can’t afford to even give the perception of favoritism.
When we’re responsible for leading a team effectively, and for achieving the best results we can with the team we’re leading, consistency is a core tenet of earning the influence we’ll need to have in order to get (and keep) buy-in from our team members. Wavering in any way will quickly lead to us being known as anything but a bridge builder…
For what it’s worth, even the most consistent approach won’t always be viewed as fair. Heck, I’ve been told more than a few times that life’s not fair! To build strong teams that are engaged and profitable, there’s one more thing we need to constantly consider along with consistency. We’ll close by looking at that then we’ll jump into some team leadership skills that ties all this together in the next installment…
Life, Liberty, and Equal Treatment?
Before we turn the corner and begin working through some skills we can each hone to lead our teams more effectively, and in turn yield higher engagement and stronger profit margins, let’s circle back to that idea of being countable…
Just outside my office, we have a really big copy of the Declaration of Independence hanging on the wall. If memory serves, it’s one like Nicholas Cage got from the Smithsonian gift shop in National Treasure, and I think having it matted and framed was far more costly than the actual copy. So be it, I still place huge value on all it represents!
In 1776, Thomas Jefferson opened the preamble of that great document by stating, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
As much as I’d really like to go off on a rabbit trail about his intentional use of the capital C in Creator and the sentence that immediately follows the one I just shared, defining the very limited purpose and scope of government, that’s not where I want to go (for now) with regards to the importance of team leadership… That said, let’s consider those certain unalienable rights - Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness - as it relates to earning the kind of influence we’ll need in order to create a sense of teamwork in the organizations we lead.
Having just emphasized how critical it is that you and I be extremely consistent, being countable when it counts, I need to hit on what often becomes a really tough topic; a topic that can ruffle a lot of feathers in one way or another.
What’s that topic? Equality, often referred to as fairness…
Think back to that comment I made before about even the most consistent treatment not always being viewed as fair. And if you have kids, I’d challenge you to think about how many times they’ve told you something wasn’t fair. Gosh, I even heard a 50 year old male make a comment recently that someone else had responsibility for feeding his kids - and tied it to fairness…
Let’s be honest, what any given person considers as fairness or equality can be very closely tied to their perception. As leaders, there’s no way that we’ll ever be able to effectively serve the perception of everyone on our teams at all times. Jefferson didn’t claim that happiness was an unalienable right, he said the pursuit of happiness was!
So how can we possibly approach this in a way that shows effective team leadership? In my experience, our only real option is to be as consistent as we possibly can AND in a way that’s just (the adverb, not the adjective, which means “based on or behaving according to what’s morally right).
During the years I worked in a safety role, part of my responsibility was to help lead every incident investigation. In many organizations, the general perception is that you get written up if you’re injured in an accident. And unfortunately, that perception is far too often based on fact. Quite frankly, there were indeed times when we issued disciplinary action to an individual who was injured in a workplace incident, but it was tied directly to whether or not they violated a work rule or safety rule. If no policy was violated, no disciplinary action was issued. While that wasn’t always how the scenario was perceived by the individual who was injured or the folks they worked beside and told afterward, there were still a few issues with that approach even when we followed it consistently.
Here’s the first issue… Just like we don’t get a ticket every time we exceed the speed limit, someone isn’t injured every time they do something that violates a work or safety rule. To that end, I can point to far too many occasions where supervisors and managers were right beside an employee violating a rule but didn’t so much as comment on the behavior since nothing went wrong! Both consequences, not getting injured each time and the observed policy violation not being addressed, only reinforced that the policy violation was acceptable - at least as long as nothing bad happened…
The second issue ties directly to the reactive nature of issuing discipline after the injury; rubbing salt in the wound so to speak. That ultimately sent a message tying the punishment to reporting the incident rather than the actual behavior that caused it.
While it was never popular, I frequently challenged management team members when they pushed to issue disciplinary action to someone who was injured. I asked for examples of when they had applied similar disciplinary action to someone they witnessed using the same behaviors without being injured. When they couldn’t, which was nearly every time, I asked them to clarify what the discipline was really for - violating the policy or getting hurt. Again, that was never a popular question but it certainly drove home the point that our responsibility as leaders is to provide our team with just treatment! Not necessarily always fair, but definitely morally right…
If we’re not willing to do the work to be consistent in our actions and build a just and equitable environment, the team leadership skills we’ll be working through next will be of little value! Until then, I’d challenge you to work through our new Servant Leadership quiz to see how you’re doing in regards to earning the influence you’ll need for effective team leadership; you’ll get complimentary access to our digital course called Build a Reputation as a Servant Leader just for completing it!
Are You A Servant Leader?
In his book, The Servant, James Hunter said, “A leader is someone who recognizes and meets the legitimate needs of their people, and removes all the barriers so they can serve the customer.”
Servant Leadership has become a bit of a catch phrase, but are you doing what it takes to be known as one? Take this quiz to see how you're doing and get complimentary access to our exclusive digital course called Build a Reputation as a Servant Leader - a $60 value that's approved for credit through SHRM and HRCI.