The New Manager's Guide To Getting The Most From Your Team
We could simplify the job of a Manager to one sentence.
To maximise the impact of your team using the resources at your disposal.
Of course, that involves sub steps such as how we most accurately define output. But that gives us a good frame for focusing our efforts.
Once we’ve defined and set a goal to achieve, the next step is to assess the resources we have.
Obviously there’s budget and there’s material resources. Our greatest resource though, are the people we work with. This is what we’re going to look at here.
It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) that those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.
Great Leaders Change Lives
Jurgen Klopp turned a poor Liverpool team into one of the best in the world with ⅓ of the budget of his rivals?
Yet, at the same time, Manchester United went in the opposite direction. From title winners to an average team. Despite spending more than three times the money Liverpool spent.
How do we get the most from our team?
It’s not necessarily about money. It’s about getting the whole of the team to be worth much more than the sum of its parts. To achieve this we need a better map to understand people.
People are the building blocks of teams.
Yet, so often they’re put together without care. Chucked on a team bonding session. Or put to work and assumed that they’re adults, they’ll figure it out.
From Zero To Hero To Zero
Football is a great place to look to see the dynamics all teams face.
Even if you don’t like or know about the game, you can still learn lessons. Billions are spent on building teams. Yet it’s the most together team that wins.
Manchester United spent hundreds of millions on players.
They spent the most money buying proven stars. Yet players that were world beaters elsewhere were huge disappointments. They had to be sold for huge losses… or even worse paid huge salaries without playing.
Many Managers in organisations make the same mistake.
They want proven performers. Yet sometimes the high-flyer can fail in a different environment. Success is contextual.
People perform on a range from their best to worst.
In one context they can be champions. In another they can look average. Performance depends on what the environment activates in them.
So we have to create the environment that enables people to thrive.
This is the key to Klopp’s success at Liverpool. He brought everyone together as one unit. And he gave people the belief and confidence to thrive.
He bought players that underperformed elsewhere and never played as well after leaving.
As the Leader of a team this is our goal.
Create an environment that brings out the best in everyone. So then you can get the most out of each member of your team. Then you connect them in a way that makes the team outperform your competition.
A bad team like Manchester United does the opposite.
They sought out the best individual players. Lower their confidence and performance. Then blame the player and repeat the mistake.
The moral of this story is that we can bring out the best or worst in our team.
Left Alone Most People Won't Perform
Apparently, there are about 69,000 Personal Trainers in the UK.
If you think about it, what does a PT actually do? We can all google and find a workout for what we want to achieve. We can all find a video on the form we need for an exercise.
So why do so many people pay someone to watch them exercise?
I think what most people are paying for is accountability. Because left alone they won’t do it. Diet clubs serve the same purpose.
We need someone to hold us accountable.
But it’s not just being accountable for our performance. It’s someone that can believe in us even when we don’t. It’s someone that can unlock hidden levels of performance.
These are the people we most value… though not necessarily at the time.
A famous quote from the ancient Greek Philosopher Archilocus is insightful to this…
“We don't rise to the level of our expectations; we fall to the level of our training”.
Your team won’t perform to their capacity. They will fall to the level you accept. And they’ll fall to their natural operating level.
Your job is to raise their level of operating.
Yet a common minefield new Managers fall into is trying to be ‘nice’. Not asking too much because you don’t feel you have the authority. And hoping people will do more because you don’t want conflict or awkwardness.
Of course, sometimes this flips to the opposite extreme where we demand.
Then we’re trying to show our strength. But in doing so, we push people. Beyond where we have the authority to influence them.
The key is coming to understand your authority.
This is why after sharing the maps and the paths we look at your foundations as a leader. Because it is these that give you authority. Ultimately leadership comes down to the connections you make because of who you are and what you stand for.
A Team's Performance Is A Chemical Reaction
Perhaps, the most damaging myth to the team has been the Great Man Theory.
This is the idea that some people are born with certain qualities that set them up for success. It is like the fixed mindset Carol Dweck talked about. The idea that you are born good,or bad, at certain things rather than have the ability to grow skills.
As we saw in the football example, great players often perform or don’t based on the team they are in.
Behaviour is always contextual. There’s a chemical reaction between people and the context they are operating within. There are 4 key elements that we need to be aware of to understand the chemical reactions.
The Cultural Environment
The environment we are in plays a big part in our culture. If you look at powerful civilisations they got their power from environmental benefits. Egypt became a great early civilisation because The Nile river brought it advantages.
There are elements in your environment that created the culture of your organisation.
This sets cues and norms for expected behaviour. This is powerful because we tend to pay attention to others for norms to follow. How things are done will influence how people act, react and interact.
The Current context
Your leadership style, the larger organisation and customers provide the current context.
What does your culture, organisation and your leadership style optimise for? Every team or workplace optimises for something. In the best, it is optimised around performance and growth.
In the worst, there is a vacuum into which people optimise for their own comfort.
The Mix of Personalities In The Team
Closely linked to this is the mix of personalities in the group.
Culture is a living thing. It is the totality of our interactions. There are historical contexts and current contexts and responses.
High performing teams have strong personalities that demand certain standards are met. There are attitudes and beliefs to how we perform. These create peer pressure to perform.
How people respond to you can be dependent on these.
The madness of mobs happens because they give each other permission to misbehave. Equally, a positive team spirit can pull troublemakers back into line. Knowing the current mix and how to influence them is key to getting great team performance.
Individual Personal Factors
The last element is one you have little control over.
Everyone who enters your work, already has a history. Their past experiences will shape their assumptions, beliefs and expectations. What’s going on in their lives and in their past creates an ongoing inner narrative.
Work is part of their bigger picture of life.
How they sleep, the health they are in, stress they are under and so on also determine their energy levels. This two factors, their inner narrative and functioning level are key in how they respond. Knowing these allows you to adapt in how you interact with them.
These different chemicals all create a unique chemical mix.
You need to be sensitive to how people are interpreting you, their peers and culture. You need to think about what your work flows, rewards, style etc are optimising for. And you need to lead the culture and interactions to create the environment to perform.
You Don't Start At Zero
Leadership is a massive challenge because you have to be aware of all of these factors.
But I don’t think most people truly appreciate the challenges. Because as a Leader you don’t start at zero. You start from a negative basis.
Quiet quitting. The Great Resignation. Epidemics of burnout.
Organisations face three critical challenges that make your job even harder.
work today is not our natural biological environment
The first is that work as we know it is inherently stressful. Our biology is competing with our social environment. And so people are stressed before we even look at the work they are doing.
We last evolved over 50,000 years ago.
So biologically we are built to be a nomadic hunter in a small tribe. Time was not a concept. And everyone we were around, we knew our whole lives.
10,000 years ago we settled as farmers.
Civilisations were built. And gradually we became socialised into living in larger groups. We learned to identify with cities and later even countries.
200 – 300 years ago the Industrial Revolution changed everything again.
We went from families working together to working in factories with strangers. We moved from villages and smallholdings to cities. We no longer knew most of the people we saw.
We have been socialised into working in the modern world.
But our biology is an adaptation to a different world. Strangers bring stress. And where stress would usually be resolved by action, we now comfort ourselves with food.
The modern workplace is inherently stressful for our nervous systems.
The Nature Of Relationships Has Changed
This impairs our natural performance levels. This combines with something else that stresses us. We have different relationships today than we ever have.
Historically, relationships were between family or other people we’d always known.
Most people were focused on survival. Families were economic units held together for working the smallholdngs. We lived shorter lives that were simpler.
Today, we take survival for granted and seek emotional satisfaction in our relationships.
This expectation and quest for self actualisation has also moved into the workplace. Where once people worked to live. Today with many choices, they seek meaning and purpose in their work.
Also, the nature of our work has changed.
When you work in a factory handling things everyone knows a widget is a widget. When we talk about performance, effectiveness and so on, do we mean the same thing? Abstract language requires much more precision in our communication.
Today we need to work with people we know little about.
All of the old patterns that told us if we could trust someone no longer apply. Relationships are different now and often more superficial. Yet we’re seeking to manage them with little awareness of how relationships work.
This makes work more stressful.
The Economic Imperative
The third factor is that most of our organisations are run with an economic imperative.
Corporates are owned by facelesss shareholders who demand more and more ROI. They optimise for profit. Which means that at times people have to do things they don’t like or believe in.
Decisions are made not for the good of people, but for profit and the share price.
We even call people human resources. As if we bought and can exploit them. In a 20,000 plus organisation it is easy to feel devalued and dehumanised. Modern organisations are not optimised to make people perform.
They often have the opposite effect.
You may feel it yourself in your encounters. But the point is that your awareness of this dynamic can help you. When you know that they probably won’t feel loyal or even positive about the organisation.
This is where you can be the bridge for your team.
Where the organisation treats them as expenses in the accounts. You can be the person who cares. The link who humanises an inhuman machine.
This is why a person’s Boss is the main reason for someone staying or leaving an organisation.
Because your interactions are the face of the organisation. You represent your organisation to your team. And you represent your team to the organisation.
Your empathy to these three factors though can help you build stronger links to your team.
Why Stress Makes Us Childish
Does the office ever make you feel like you’re back in the schoolyard?
There’s a reason why. Stress activates fear in people. And under stress we react with our survival instinct.
Neuroscientist Paul Maclean’s came up with the Triune Brain Theory in the 60’s.
Neuroscientists have disproved it as they found the brain is more adaptive. But for our purposes it is a useful way of looking at stress responses. It gives us a simplified rule of thumb that’s easy to operate from.
Basically, it says we have three layers of brain.
The reptilian that operates on a survival level. A limbic mind that operates on an emotional level. And a cerebral cortex that has our most rational thinking.
Someone stressed is in survival mode and cannot think rationally.
So it doesn’t matter how intelligent they are. They will operate at the level of intelligence that is activated. Survival, emotional or rational.
As a leader, your job is not to react with your nervous system… or more accurately learn to override it.
It is to soothe their nervous system so they stay rational. Because at the rational level, they have access to their best thinking. And so you can work together.
Conflict is a problem for teams because it activates survival or emotional thinking.
As a result people stop acting rationally. They either go into fight or flight. Or they become overly emotional.
We will cover conflict in much more detail later, but this is an area we need to be aware of in understanding people.
Because of all the factors we have discussed people are often more stressed than they are aware of. As such, they aren’t operating at their best. And so interactions and collaboration are more challenged.
Understanding IHuman
People work much like smartphones.
Phones have hardware that limits their overall capacity. There are apps you can download for certain functions. But it all works from a largely hidden Operating System.
People are much the same.
Our genetics determine the limits of our potential. We can learn skills in time. But most of what we operate from, is our Operating System.
Mostly, we operate on autopilot.
When we do something new like driving, it takes a lot of conscious effort. After a while it becomes something we do while talking or listening to music. Soon we are doing without even being aware of doing it.
But it’s not just actions that run out autopilot.
Our assumptions and beliefs are embedded in our O/S. And so we respond and react to people and events based on these. It is only when we face a problem or conflict that we think to examine them.
This is what we call the unconscious.
Motivational speakers and Hypnotists talk a lot of nonsense about the unconscious. Like their subliminal messages can programme it positively. But the truth is, it’s unconscious because it hasn’t been examined.
That’s all.
It’s mostly decisions that we made many years ago and haven’t since questioned. It’s the understandings we came to based on teaching, observations and experience. Some are cultural and some individual.
Say for example, we told someone at nursery school a secret and they told everyone.
In that moment as a 3 year old, we made a rule not to share secrets. Over the following years, lots and lots of experiences have covered that incident. So we never even think of the rule or the memory… it’s an unspoken and unexamined part of our O/S.
How The O/S Is Encoded
To understand the O/S, we have to know how it was formed.
We’re born with millions and millions of neurons. These neurons connect when we think, or do, something new. When it’s done again and again, it becomes hardwired as a neural pathway.
Think of a path made by hundreds of people walking through a field.
That becomes the path everyone else follows. Unless we have good reason. And a lot of conscious effort.
We just keep to the same pathway.
This is why change, or learning a new skill, is so difficult. It means we have to spend a lot of energy to consciously do something new. Until the thoughts or actions become hard wired.
This is why we have the 10,000 hour rule of achieving excellence in a skill.
Because s we practice we develop the pathway to automate it. Then repetition covers the neurons with a myelin sheath. That then hardwires the skill.
About 70% of our neural pathways are wired up by the age of 7.
After that most new connections are branches of our existing pathways. So how we move, speak and think is mostly set by this time. It’s also most of our opinions and outlook on the world.
Babies are learning by observation and experience.
Children learning the world often take as gospel what their elders tell them. So when a teacher shouts at them for speaking up. They generalise it as a rule to not speak up.
Later it might cause them a problem and they consciously override this belief.
But all of us are walking around with false ideas that we have never thought to re-examine. Yet these inner maps are causing all the problems we create in our world today. We only know what we’re operating on as we hit problems.
Often we spend time and money developing skills like for example communication skills.
But often the problem is at the level of O/S. Maybe there’s a deep fear in our operating system about speaking up. And so it’s not necessarily a skill deficit as much as an O/S bug.
The skill, like an app, only gets a chance to run properly if the fear or conflict in the O/S is updated.
Intellectually, we might know something is true. But intellectual knowledge is only used when we are calm and rational enough to access it. Most of the time we operate at a lower level of understanding.
But it’s not what we ‘know’ that matters, but what we have operated on time and time again that gets hardwired.
The only way we can know someone’s O/S is observing their words and actions. Through communication and deep empathy to understand them. But this still requires some referential experience to be able to relate to how they might feel.
And it takes deep introspection for them – and us – to understand our own make up.
This series of maps is an intellectual overview of the topic of people management. Intellectual understanding brings an awareness to a topic. But it’s practising it over and over again that ingrains it into your O/S.
Where Emotions Are Made
In order to understand our team we have to have a frame to understand why they act and react as they do.
Emotions are created by the combination of incidents with the narrative from our O/S. We need to know what happened. And what their interpretation of that event was.
We will revisit this topic in more detail later, but there are three core drivers of this.
Understanding The Three Core Drives
People are constantly judging events against their perceived needs
There are three core universal human needs that dominate our perceptions. We need to feel…
that we belong within a tribe.
that we are valued within that tribe.
and that the tribe we are part of is heading somewhere meaningful.
Every event is measured against these criteria.
For example if everyone is going on a night out. If I didn’t get an invite. It immediately tells me I don’t belong.
When someone has a better office, title, parking space. That signals they are higher status and more valued than me. I’m less important to the pack.
When I feel there’s literally no point in doing this, I’m wasting my time there’s no meaning in this. I feel there is no meaning or purpose to my work.
Most organisations and Bosses are poor at meeting these needs.
They focus on what the business needs. What I want from you. And in doing so, they diminish the internal motivations to thrive.
This is why Gallup’s research says that 85% of workers are disengaged from their work.
Relationships are built on reciprocity. When you demand more than you give, people walk away. Either physically or emotionally.
Businesses have traditionally told people to leave their emotions at the door.
And they have. They’ve operated as robots. And that is why there is such a lack of engagement.
Most people’s have turned to hobbies to get these needs met. They do or follow sports or music. They find somewhere they can feel they belong and are valued.
If you can meet their needs they’ll invest more and engage fully in their work.