First Time Manager — Understand Your Team
How to use Situational Leadership skill
As first time managers, it is important to understand that you need to work with each team member differently, otherwise you will create conflicts with team members. So, how do you work with each team member differently? Situational leadership skill is there for rescue.
Leadership is an art of adapting their style of leading to suit each team member.
Before you go further, in case you haven’t read the previous blogs related to this, I would request to read those. Here are the links.
How to get started: First Time Manager — Part 1
Leadership style Delegation: First Time Manager — Part 2
What is Situational Leadership?
The skill of a manager to adapt his management in line with each individual in the team is referred as situational leadership.
Many first time managers, they work with the team members with many assumptions. The managers assume that all team members work with the same speed, mind set, knowledge, commitment, motivation and so on. This is one of the key reasons that some first time managers fail to enjoy the transition as they will see a confused team in front of them.
As a first time manager, it is important to realise that each individual team member comes with a different level of skills and different level of motivation. The framework of situational leadership provides ability for any manager to visualise the team in different dimensions and adapt accordingly.
The dimensions for the framework could differ. Generally the dimension used is skill vs motivation. As a manager, you need to work differently with highly skilled and highly motivated individual versus a highly skilled but with low motivation. If you do not adapt, then the team member with low motivation, will not give you the desired result, even though that person is highly skilled.
Situational Leadership Framework
In my experience, the situational leadership can be used by any leader in an organisation irrespective of the level that person is in. Below, there are two variation of the framework that I use.
Dimension 1: Skill vs Motivation
If you can identify which quadrant, each of your team member fall, then you know who is highly skilled but less motivated and who is low skilled and less motivated and so on. This will help you in many ways.
Let’s take a person who falls in highly skilled with high motivation. The way you need to work with this person is using delegation. If you try to manage this person more, then the individuals’ motivation level will slowly fall as the team member will feel uncomfortable working with you as the member does not need minor details about the assigned task.
Let’s say, if a person is low skilled but highly motivated, then your approach should be providing opportunities to improve skills by pairing with buddies. With this person, constant 1-on-1s, detailed design and code reviews, brain storming sessions would be required.
This is adaptability. How you work with each person depends on which quadrant the member belongs. How you assign the task and how you follow up with that person will also depends on which quadrant the team member belongs.
Dimension 2: Skill vs Experience
Another variation of situational leadership is skill vs experience. This is a tricky scenario. Let’s say there are team members who have high experience but low skill as they have been working on legacy tools; also there are team members with new skills as they work on new technologies but their work experience is low.
You must find a way to work with more experienced person with legacy tools. You must help them to align towards new technologies / skills. Otherwise you will end up having conflict. This is because, these set of team members will take defensive position as they will feel, new technologies / skills as a threat to their growth.
In this dimension, those team members who fall under low skill and low experience, are generally freshers or less than 1 year experience. How you train them and get them up to speed, becomes important, otherwise there is a high probability, they will quit early due to lack of support from the manager.
As a first time manager, keep the above dimensions in reference and adapt, how you work with each individual. It is important to do the mapping of each member into the quadrant as early as possible, so that you can work out a plan on how to work. This will lead to becoming a successful first time manager.
DOs and Don’ts
➊ Do, early mapping of team members into one of the variation, so that you can adapt your management style to each person in the team early on.
➋ Do, share your mapping with peer or your manager and validate your assumptions and criteria. This will help you to make sure that the mapping is done right. Wrong mapping will lead to conflicts.
➌ Do, review of the mapping every 3months, to see the progress. Without this, the data will be stale and your adaptation will not lead to good results.
➍ Do not make the mapping too complex. Use the skill vs motivation dimension to start with and then expand.
➎ Do not share your mapping of each team member to everyone. This will lead to conflict. Use this mapping only for your use and probably for your manager to decide a roadmap for the team.
➏ Do not stress yourself in adapting your style to every one in the team from the start. As a first time manager, these things are new, so try with few team members, get some confidence and then start the process with others.
Conclusion
Situational leadership style will give a good view of where your team stand. This will help you to adapt the way you work with them. As a first time manager, it is important to understand the view of the team regularly. Many first time managers, start doing their job without understanding each team member’s mind set. Hence they get into lot of conflicts, leading to stress. So to have a enjoyable transition towards management role, use situational leadership style effectively.
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This blog is part of the First Time Manager series, here is the link to the reading list.
