Chapter 2. Matching leadership styles to team phases
- Three team phases
- Leadership types
- Goals for team leaders
This chapter is a quick guide to recognizing the three team phases and the leadership types that make the most sense for each phase.
First, let’s clarify why we need to define these phases. The reasons have to do with our overall goal as team leaders. What do you think your role is as a team leader? For a few years, I had to guess. Nobody told me and I had no one to learn from.
Before we go on, I want to clarify the terms used in this book. The words phase and mode are used almost interchangeably throughout the book. For example, in the learning phase you go into learning mode. Phase is where you think your team is; mode is how you react to which phase you’re in. Think of it like the fight-or-flight instincts that we all have. When these instincts take over, we act a certain way. So you might say that when we recognize we are in the survival phase, we initiate our survival instinct or survival mode. Or if we recognize that we’re operating in learning mode while our organization is operating in survival mode, we can say we’re in a survival phase and we should initiate survival mode behavior and instinct.
The role of the team leader
In the past, one of my biggest mistakes as a team leader was that I didn’t recognize that my style of leadership was oblivious to the needs of my team.
Initially, my idea of what a team leader should do went something like this: a team leader should provide their team everything the team needs and then get out of their way.
Boy, did I think I was stellar! When people needed something—working code, infrastructure, a faster machine, or an answer to something—I was their guy. By my own definition back then, I was doing a great job. But that meant that I had little time for myself and was mostly in meetings or coding all day. I didn’t allow myself to take even a couple of days to go on a vacation. I was always at work because people needed me. And it felt great to be needed.
Looking back, I can see lots of room for improvement, because the role of a team leader is vastly different from solving problems and getting out of the way.
Growth through challenge
Here’s what I believe my role is today: a team leader helps develop quality people on the team.
I believe this should be your first “compass” in determining your behavior as a lead. You may ask, “What about delivering value to the company?” I believe that delivering value flows naturally from developing your team’s skills. When people grow, value delivery also grows because skills grow. More importantly, the attachment and commitment of people to do the right thing also grows. Loyalty grows.
One of my mentors, Eli Lopian, told me this once:
People don’t quit their jobs. They quit their managers.
I think that’s a true statement (at least for the several companies I’ve quit). By coaching the people on your team to develop as team players or valuable working individuals, you generate internal value for them personally, not only for the company. True loyalty comes when you have everything to gain by sticking around and you realize it.
Challenge
More things logically follow if your guiding rule is to help people grow. To grow people at work means to help them acquire new skills. For them to acquire skills, you must challenge them. Therefore, you have to stop solving all their problems for them and coach them to solve problems on their own (with your guidance). If you solve all problems for your team, the only person learning how to do new things is you.
You’re the bottleneck
When you solve all your team’s problems, you’re the bottleneck, and they’ll find themselves unable to manage without you. If you’re sick for three days, can you leave your phone turned off? Or are you constantly worried and logging in to the company’s VPN to check and fix things that nobody else on the team can do? If the team has to wait for you to be available to solve problems, you’re the bottleneck, and you’ll never have time to do the things that matter most.
Crunch time and leadership styles
You might think, “Well, that makes no sense. We’re in crunch time! The release is late, and now I’m supposed to take what little time we have left to teach people new things? I have enough on my plate as it is!” And you’d be right. It’s not always a good idea to start challenging people. Sometimes, challenges don’t make sense.
Challenging people is one style of leadership. Let’s talk about two more:
- Command-and-control leadership
- Facilitating leadership
Why do we need to talk about the other styles? Because challenging to encourage growth isn’t always a good idea. I know it sounds crazy and is contrary to the advice of agilists, but hear me out. Sometimes, a command-and-control style of leadership is required, especially in survival mode, as we’ll discuss in the next few chapters.
Command and control is sometimes a good idea because there are times when a team leader must be able to direct their team down a path where the team has no time to learn the skills needed to deal with the current circumstances (such as when fighting many fires).
The third leadership style, facilitation, is described by many agile consultants this way: “Lock the team in a room, give them a goal, and get the hell out of their way.” Agile methodologies sometimes call this a “self-organizing” team.
Facilitation is a good idea sometimes, if the team already knows how to do the work and solve their own problems. A command-and-control leader would get in the way of getting the job done.
Which leadership style should you choose
It seems like the previously discussed approaches—challenge, command-and-control, and facilitation—are good styles at different points in time. Team leaders have succeeded by doing each, but many have failed with each as well. When does it make sense to use each of these different leadership ideas? When are the times that, as a leader, you need to take charge and start making hard decisions? When will using command-and-control leadership hurt more than it helps? When should you lock your team in a room and get out of their way because they know what they’re doing?
I’ll recap the three different leadership types that I’ve seen in the wild:
- Challenging/coaching leader
- Command-and-control leader
- Facilitating leader (self-organizing teams)
It’s easier for me to start with an answer to an opposing question: “When should I not use each leadership style?”
Let’s examine each one in turn and see when each can result in negative consequences.
Command and control
We have all seen or been this type of leader at some point. You tell people what to do. You are the “decider.” You take one for the team, but you also have the team in your pocket in terms of hierarchy, decision-making, and control over everyone’s actions.
The command-and-control leader might also try to solve everyone’s problems. I once had a team leader who, my first day on the team, set up my laptop while typing blazingly fast on the keyboard and not sharing with me anything he was doing. When I asked questions, he muttered something along the lines of “Don’t concern yourself with this now. You have more important things to do.” (Read that sentence with a heavy Russian accent for better effect.)
With a controlling leader, there’s little room for people to learn, take sole ownership, or take initiative that might go against the rules. The consequences are too undesirable.
The command-and-control approach won’t work if your team already knows what they’re doing or if they expect to learn new things and be challenged to become better.
Coach
The coach is also known as “the teacher” and is great at teaching new things to others. The opposite of the controlling leader, the coach is great at teaching others to make decisions while letting them make the wrong decisions as long as there’s an important lesson to be learned.
Time is not an issue for a coach, because learning requires time. It’s like teaching your kid to put on their shoes and tie their shoelaces—it takes time, but it’s an important skill, and you’d be making a mistake not taking the time to let your kid go through this exercise on their own, cheering them from the sidelines.
The coaching approach won’t work if you and your team don’t have enough free time to practice and do any learning. If you’re busy putting out fires all day, and you’re already behind schedule anyway, you won’t have time to also learn or try new things like refactoring or test-driven development.
Facilitator
The facilitator stays out of everyone’s way. Whereas the coach challenges people to stop and learn something, the facilitator makes sure that the current environment, conditions, goals, and constraints are such that they will drive the team to get things done. The facilitator doesn’t solve the team’s problems but instead relies on the team’s existing skills to solve their own problems.
The facilitator approach won’t work if the team doesn’t have sufficient skills to solve their own problems (such as slow machines, customer demands, and so on).
Now that we’ve discussed circumstances that are unfavorable for each leadership style, let’s talk about when they’re most effective.
Leadership styles and team phases
Each of these leadership types belongs in a different phase of the team’s needs. There are times when a team needs a commander, times when it needs a coach, and times when it needs a facilitator. I call them the three team phases.
A beta tester for the book commented that the word phase gives him a bad vibe “due to bad memories on some poorly managed, waterfall-style projects.” I’m still not sure what to call these things myself. States might be better suited, but I’m still debating this. If you have a better name for what I call team phases, email me at [email protected] (or through contact.osherove.com) with the subject “Naming Phases.”
The three team phases
These phases are how I decide which leadership type is required for the current team (see figure 2.1). The question “Which leadership type is right?” should be asked on a daily basis because teams can flow in and out of these phases based on many factors.
Figure 2.1. The three team phases
Survival phase (no time to learn)
Survival sounds dramatic and is as alarming as it sounds. It doesn’t necessarily mean coffee-stained carpets and a sleepless staff. I define survival as your team not having enough time to learn.
In order to accomplish your goal as a leader (coaching people to grow), you need to make time to learn, and your main strategy, or instinct during this phase, is to get the team out of the survival phase by creating slack time. In order to get slack time, you’ll most likely need to use a command-and-control style of leadership.
Learning phase (learning to solve your own problems)
You can tell you’re in the learning phase when your team has enough slack time to learn and experiment and you’re using that slack time.
Slack time can be used for learning new skills, removing technical debt, or, better yet, doing both at the same time:
- Learning and gradually implementing test-driven development, with people who have no experience
- Enhancing or building a continuous integration cycle, with people who have no experience
- Enhancing test coverage, with people who have no experience
- Learning about and refactoring code, with people who have no experience
In short, use slack time to do anything constructive, and tack on the phrase “with people who have no experience” at the end of the sentence.
Your main goal as a leader (in order to achieve your overall role of growing people) is to grow the team to be self-organizing by teaching and challenging them to solve their own problems.
In order to achieve that, you need to become more of a coaching leader, with the occasional intervention of the controlling leader for those cases when you don’t have enough slack time to learn from a specific mistake.
Self-organizing phase (facilitate, experiment)
You can tell you’re in the self-organizing phase if you can leave work for a few days without being afraid to turn off your cell phone and laptop. If you can do that, come back, and find that things are going well, your team is in the unique position of solving their own problems without your help.
Your goal in the self-organizing phase is to keep things as they are by being a facilitator, and keep a close eye on the team’s ability to handle the current reality. When the team’s dynamics change, you can determine which leadership style you need to use next.
The self-organizing phase is also a lot of fun because this is the phase where you have the most time to experiment and try different approaches, constraints, and team goals that will develop your team.
This is the point where you have time to do the things that matter most. As a leader, you have a vision. If you’re always keeping your head down, you can’t look up and see if your team is going in the right direction.
From my personal experience, most of the teams I’ve seen are far from self-organizing. My belief (though I have little more than gut feeling and anecdotal experience) is that maybe 5% of software teams in the world are truly self-organizing and are capable of solving their own problems. Some 80% of the software teams out there are probably in survival mode. How often have you been part of a team that kept putting out fires and never had time to do “the right thing”?
How do you switch to a different phase?
When does a team move between phases
It’s important that you recognize when your team needs a new type of leadership, and you’ll have to keep a close eye on the team’s main assets; see figure 2.2. Any event that can shift the balance of the following team assets can cause the team to have different needs from you as a leader:
Figure 2.2. Detecting your team’s mode
- Asset #1: The team’s knowledge and skill to solve their own problems
- Asset #2: The team’s amount of slack time
Here are examples of events that could trigger a team phase shift:
- You bring into the team new people who lack the skills to solve their own problems. You might be going into the learning phase. If they still have time to learn, then you are indeed in the learning mode. You can use this time to teach those problem-solving skills to the new team members. Better yet, you might take the opportunity to teach some of the more experienced folks on the team how to mentor the new team members to solve their own problems. That way everyone is challenged and growing, not only the new members.
- You or someone else is changing deadlines on known goals. This could possibly remove any slack time the team is using to learn. You might be in the survival phase. Time to get out of there fast by removing some commitments and making more slack time available for learning!
Next up
This chapter was a quick walk-through of recognizing the three team phases and leadership types that make the most sense for each phase. In the next few chapters, I’ll go through each of the team phases, diving deeply into the specific leadership styles and techniques that have proved effective for me.
Summary
- The role of the team leader is to grow the people on their team. This growth is the overall compass through which the leader should navigate important decisions. To grow, the team must first have time to practice new skills and make mistakes; slack time is necessary.
- In survival mode, there’s no time to learn, and the leader helps make time for the team. In the learning phase, the leader coaches the team and helps them grow; and in the self-organization phase, the leader acts more as a facilitator, letting the team move on without much interference.
- A team can move between the states rapidly based on the current reality and makeup of the team.