How You can Lead Your Team to Success with Four Effective Leadership Principles

As an engineering leader, you need to manage processes and lead teams. The days when leaders thought "my people must do what I say" passed long ago. Now, leaders must think and act on this question: "How can I help my team succeed?" As a leader, you learn to operate with constraints. In an ideal world, you could provide your team with anything they need: software, highest performing multi-cored multi-threaded computers, multiple computer monitors per desk, comprehensive employee training, and much more. You can provide anything your team needs, yet you cannot provide everything at once.  When you transition from engineering into leadership, you will find the soft aspect of leadership to be difficult at time. You will find communication paramount. In this article, I provide advice on how you can lead your teams to success.

Set Clear Boundaries with your Team

You serve as an interface between your engineering team and other managers. Difficulties can arise because you and your team members might report to multiple individuals. Why does this happen? Your engineers receive directions from multiple leaders. It can seem like too many cooks stir the pots. Not all hope is lost. Clear communication removes barriers that frustrate you and your team. By setting boundaries, you define individuals' responsibilities including your own.

How do you set clear boundaries? Call a staff meeting. It doesn't matter if you are a new manager or a seasoned one. You get your team together in one room and get issues & concerns out in the open. This process requires a combination of leadership styles, as you will request their inputs. You start by defining what you need the team to accomplish: goals against the projects they support and other business related items. Use this time to make clear how often you will hold monthly staff meetings and what you will cover in those meetings. Make sure you make clear how often you expect status reports. Make it clear what format you expect them in and how much detail they should provide.

Set boundaries, so you make your expectations clear, and you understand what your team needs

Once you set your expectations, you can switch to a democratic leadership style and seek your team's feedback. This allows you to do something important: You establish how you will behave in assisting the team succeed in their roles. Do they want you to be hands off and available only when needed? How some employees need more hands-on assistance? Do they need any training, materials, and equipment to do their jobs effectively? Each team has unique needs. Listen to your team and adjust your leadership style the best you can, so you can assist each employee.

Although I write using positive outlooks, I understand situations exist that warrant difficult measures. For example, your company might be facing a tough time, and profits become nonexistent. Your team will naturally be tense and nervous. As their leader, you must communicate the situation to them clearly and honestly. You can mitigate their fears as much as you can, yet you should state that the situation could be out of your control. In other words, good leaders are willing to show their vulnerabilities, and you might need to do just that. Although you might need to layoff employees, keep them apprised of the situation as soon as it becomes a problem. Focus on ways that employees can do their jobs better, so they can return the company to profitability, and you can avoid layoffs. However, if this becomes inevitable, make sure your staff knows how many people it will effect. Meet with low performing employees early and in private, so they can prepare for their next job. No employee likes being laid off with no notice. They might ignore the signs. I should know, as it's happened to me during my career.

Boundaries can be difficult to figure out, and you will need to customize them according to your team. My belief is that boundaries should be set at the beginning of the manager / employee relationship and adjusted throughout. However, Abe Turner at Insperity argues that they should be set later in the management strategy. This allows leaders to get to know their team better and understand their individual needs. If you remember that boundaries evolve over time, you can set initial boundaries and modify them as you and your team grow.

Of course, you should make a point to meet with other employees. Figure out which employees influence your team the most and schedule meetings with them. This brings me to my next principle.

Hold Informal Meetings with your Most Influential Team Members

You need to understand what your team needs. You do this by meeting with them and asking them questions. Your team consists of engineers having multiple levels of experience. A few of these engineers shine as leaders. These are the employees who can rally the rest of the team to reach project milestones. They lead discussions. They set meeting rhythms and maintain project status. Other engineers might look up to them. Your initial emphasis might focus on the most senior members of your team. However, ability does not necessarily correlate with years of experience.

The idea that older people should be the ones in charge is not new. In the Republic, Plato argued the case that leadership must fall to the elders. I recall his argument focused on the young people's lack of wisdom. I disagree with his argument. Although more experienced employees could possess more experience in leading projects, that does not mean that managers should not trust younger employees to lead. At the least, give an employee who shows potential for leading a small potential the opportunities. Just because employee have not had opportunities to lead teams, does not mean that they want them.

Your team leads have valuable inputs. Listen to what they have to say.

Why should you meet with the most influential team members? Why informally? It's simple: They have the eyes and ears of the team. You should set regular meeting rhythms with the entire team, say once a month. However, if you want to understand what the team needs, you seek out feedback from the few people who interact with the rest. I suggest you hold informal meetings in the sense that you allow the team leads free speaking reign. This encourages candor, honestly, and open feedback. You make them feel comfortable in the process.

When you have these meetings, you start asking three general questions:

1. Continue: What does the team (I) do well?
2. Stop: What does (do) the team (I) need to stop doing?
3. Start: What does (do) the team (I) need to start doing?

In some ways, you can see these as six questions. I wrote them compactly because the first pair of three focus on the team, and the last three questions focus on you. For effective feedback, it should flow in both directions. You can ask individuals questions. However, they might feel hesitant to approach you because you are new to the team, they are shy, etc. Seeking candid feedback from the team leads allows you to understand your performance. Remember, you want to help your team succeed. You cannot do this if they feel uncomfortable to approach you with criticism.

Remember, the purpose of these meetings is for you to help the team. You give guidance not orders. You can tell employees what to do provided your instructions align with project schedules, task assignments, and so forth. This is where the boundaries you set help.

I've discussed how you will meet with low performing employees with the goal of helping them improve their performance. At some point, you will need to meet with all of your employees individually, as each person will need assistance during their careers.You will coach them individually. I discuss this in the following section.

Coach Team Members Individually

One of my managers noted that good managers must be willing to mentor and / or coach employees individually. Each person has their own needs, and you must take time to address them. Good leaders listen intently and offer their team members advice. You will not know all of the answers, nor do your employees expect that of you. However, you seek out answers and get back to the employees because your have responsibilities to provide that information.

Coaching and mentoring are alike in some regards. You provide advice to your employees. You listen to what they have to say. However, the focus of coaching is to make sure your team succeed. (You can be both mentor and coach to individuals, but it does not make sense for you to mentor the team.) You should coach all of your employees, and you adjust your style per person. Some people are shy, so you need to proactively ask them questions. Others might provide too much, so you ask them to summarize. You might not agree with what your employees say, or you might be tempted to do the work for them. On these points, I have two statements

1. Show your employees respect. You can provide constructive feedback, yet you must not belittle them. It will damage your relationship
2. Providing your employees guidance does not mean that you do their work. You might need to hold junior employees' hands to get them started. However, you do the employee, yourself, and your company disservice if you do not allow them to solve their challenges.

My second point can be tricky to implement. You have experience, and you've probably been through what your junior employees go through now. For the sake of the business, you might feel tempting to do the work for them. Do not succumb to that temptation. The best way your junior employees can gain experience is for them to be challenged. You can still help them. With an engineering problem, you can have them work through the mathematics behind the problem. Ask them questions during each step, such as

• Why did you choose that solution?
• What do you think the next steps could be?
• What happens if you did something different at step C before you reached step D?

When you use the question style of problem solving, you do not do your employee's work. Instead, you guide them through the problem to reach a potential solution. Often, the issue is not that the employee doesn't know the answer. The issue is that the employee knows several possible answer and is unsure which one is the best. They could psych themselves out by feeling overwhelmed. In engineering undergraduate programs, the solutions to problems often follow a recipe. This is not so apparent in real life. It is your job as a manager to help your employees build their skills as they become more senior.

Of course, not all employees perform well. You should communicate with your team that you will meet with low performing employees on a regular basis. Susan Heathfield at The Balance Careers notes that "the goal of coaching is to work with the employee to solve performance problems and to improve the work of the employee, the team, and the department." You use these coaching sessions to find out what's going on with these employees, and you will help them in any way you can. As an effective leader, you would want to layoff zero employees. In the real world, however, your goal should be to layoff or fire only those employees who do not improve despite your attempts to help them succeed. By meeting with these employees, it should come as no shock when you give them notice if their performance does not improve.

During this entire article, I've written on how you help your team succeed. Of course, you are human, and you need assistance from time to time. You will need help, and you can get that help through coaching and mentorship. You get that by meeting with your own manager (i.e., the senior manager). I discuss that next.

Hold One-One-One Meetings with Your Manager

As an engineer, you might have held monthly face-to-face meeting with your manager. Now that you are a leader, you need to hold one-on-one meetings with your Senior Manager. These meetings serve several purposes:

• Flow down business strategies (technical, financial, etc.) and directives from Executive Leaders
• Get updates on the business: financials, status on products / projects, etc.
• Allow you to give summarized project status
• Discuss employee promotions
• Address staffing needs
• Give you growth opportunities

This list clearly does not contain every discussion topic, and some of these topics are self explanatory. (If you need to hire additional staff, you'll tell your senior manager and get go ahead to open an HR requisition.) However, the ones I list represent information that your staff and your manager need for success. For instance, how can you expect your team to succeed if they do not know their priorities? One of your roles is to flow down the technical strategy to your team, as they will implement it. Additionally, your team would be interested in product / project status because that will give them the big picture. It allows them to understand how their contributions affect the business.

When you meet with your Senior Manager, you give them project updates. Although you will formally do this in manager meetings, you can give your manager summaries of your team's accomplishment during face to face meetings. After all, it behooves you and your team members when you display their accomplishments. It shows that you care about their contributions, as recognition ultimately comes with rewards. This rings true if some of your employees deserve promotions. You will point out employees who show leadership potential and are ready to become team leads or managers. To be promoted, employees often prove that they're capable of doing work at a level above their current pay grade. Your manager will request that you put together a promotion package for your employee. The requirements for promotion will depend on your organization. However, you will want to substantiate each requirement with employee accomplishments. 

In the previous section, I mentioned that there will come times when you need coaching and mentoring. Let's say you just became a manager. You might not know what you're doing, or you might feel uncomfortable in your new role. Ask your new manager for advice, as all Senior Managers held first level manager positions. They struggled to lead their team effectively, and they want you to succeed. Ask them for help, and ask the following questions:

• What were the challenges you faced when you first became a manager? How did you overcome them?
• What gaps in skills do I lack or need improvement? How can I fill those gaps?
• What advice do you have on coaching poor performing employees?
• How can I get my employees to be more open in discussing problems they face?
• Is there anything in the strategy I am missing?
• What should I start, stop, continue doing?

You will find that effective leadership requires you to be self reflective and willing to continually learn. Sometimes you need to ask tough questions and have crucial conversations. These conversations will be difficult, and your manager can coach you in handling them better. You might need to take additional training, and it will take practice. However, by keeping a growth mindset, you will learn how to guide employees despite their backgrounds.

Summary

In this article, I discuss four effective leadership principles you can use to lead your team to success. First, you set clear boundaries with your team. They need to understand what to expect from you as their manager, and you need to understand what makes them tick. You can get there by meeting with your team. Use those meetings to set expectations both ways. Make sure that your team feels comfortable approaching you with their problems, and you should be willing to coach them. 

Second, you meet with the most influential members of your team. These employees have lead project roles, and they understand what other members of your team are doing. Chances are, these employees display the most outspoken natures. They achieved their leadership positions by showing willingness to take charge. You can take advantage of that to find out what they and the remainder of your team need. Third, you coach your team members individually. These meetings can be periodic, or you can hold them on an as needed basis. You guide your employees by addressing any problems they might have. You should take more time with junior employees, as they might feel unsure in their new roles fresh out of college. Coaching can be difficult at times, yet you will get better at it with practice.

Fourth, you will meet with your manager (i.e., the Senior Manager) on a regular basis to provide them with status updates and to get strategic directives. You might need coaching, so your manager can assist you in becoming a better manager. Do not be shy. Your manager has a breadth of knowledge that can you can gain, and it will help you understand several things: How to coach employees, how to address problems within the team, and so forth. To be an effective leader, you must have a growth mindset. This means you must challenge your perceptions and be willing to continually learn new skills. You can transfer those skills to your employees and help them grow in their careers. After all, some day you will become a Senior Manager. The ability to train your replacement shows you have effective leadership habits. It shows you add value to your company, and the employees you train to become managers will pass on what you taught them. They will become effective leaders who guide their teams to success.

Do you want to learn more about engineering, career advancement, and leadership? Please read my prior posts on this subject:

• Avoid the Complacency Trap Using Four Important Concepts
• Overcoming Introversion in Three Counterintuitive Steps
• How You Can Successfully Propose Your Engineering Projects using Five Principles
• Definitive Guide on Boosting Careers: How to Find Stretch Assignments
• Accelerate your career through stretch assignments 
• How to Market Yourself for Larger Paychecks and Promotions
• How to Evolve Your Stagnant Career towards Exciting Fields in STEM
• How to Turn Cynicism into Positive Action
• Sometimes leadership means cleaning up the mess you created
• Learn from your mistakes to build on your experiences