To improve team performance, start by reframing the role of manager

Employee. Subordinate. Teammate.

Some may assume that they’re different titles for the same role. Andre Martin, author of Wrong Fit, Right Fit: Why How We Work Matters More Than Ever, suggests reframing the role of both the manager and employee to enhance team performance. This excerpt from the book highlights seven ways to shift the roles—and impact—of our leaders and workers.

The prevailing winds of change around how we work have been well documented, written about, and discussed at conferences and in boardrooms. But no one struggles more than well-meaning managers who feel unprepared for the moment they find themselves in. There’s a new generation of employees with a different definition of work and higher, sometimes unrealistic, expectations for their leaders and companies. Companies are more determined than ever to have a workplace where higher productivity, deeper commitment, more customer focus, and more agility are all present.

Caught in between all of that chaos are team leaders and their teams, who are trying to stay engaged and do meaningful work. The key to organizational effectiveness is the relationship between a team leader, often called a manager, and their team. A manager oversees and distributes work, delegates tasks, and ensures optimal productivity. Given our lack of proximity to each other (even when working in the office) and the shifting needs of employees, the moniker of “the manager” is both unfulfilling and not fit for purpose. Companies must invest in building both strong team leaders and strong team members—ensuring each knows their roles and responsibilities in building a strong and vibrant team climate.

Enhancing the manager role to team leader

The team leader is a role that is not for the faint of heart—cheerleader, counselor, confidant, mentor, leader, coach, friend, and culture carrier. As teams become more distributed, work becomes more asynchronous and virtual, expectations to balance productivity with energy heighten, and commitment to our organizations wanes, team leaders are the lynchpin. It used to be that there were multiple connection points to the company on a daily basis—campuses, cafés, full team meetings, face-to-face training—but now (even in the back-to-the-office sect), we are both less enamored with the perks and more willing to be less proximate.

So, the team leader becomes the sharp point of the spear or the tip of the funnel, whereby many judgments about the company and fit will be filtered through. It is not that there hasn’t been a focus on training managers; the role, the expectations, and the pressure have shifted dramatically. So, companies and leadership should look toward shifting their support as well. Here are four shifts to consider right now:

• Find the best and brightest and make them designers. There are team leaders in every company who are exceptional, whose team reveres them, and whose performance outpaces the norm. They have shifted, adapted, and found better practices to help them and their teams succeed. These are the muses. How they work should be examined closely, and they should be invited to design support and training for the rest.
• Reframe the role from manager to team leader. We must look at the team leader level within the company and reset the expectations, realign their responsibilities, and reconsider how many team members they lead and how deep their organizations are. Leading people is infinitely more challenging than it used to be, so these roles should be full-time, and the teams being led should be bigger.
• Make team leaders the first group re-recruited. We are at the point where all employees must be returned to the company during any significant transformation, whether planned or in reaction to a disruptive event. Once the purpose, strategy, values, and mode of working have been set, build capability in team leaders to bring those things to life. Stewarding culture is a capability, not a communication effort. These team leaders are the culture (as it is created in how they interact with their teams daily), and they are the strategy (whether strategy is participated in or not).
• Find new and more frequent ways to measure engagement, commitment, energy, productivity, and inspiration. Team leaders will struggle, and they may not be aware when they are pushing too hard, not pushing hard enough, or not keeping a pulse on their team due to the lack of proximity—either from hybrid ways of working or simply because team leaders can’t be all places at all moments. Creating a more regular way to see where their team members are and how they are doing is key. It doesn’t have to be complex or a fifty-item survey, but we do need a way to measure our team’s health quickly, easily, and more often.

The rise of the team member

Inc. Magazine reports that the optimal number of direct reports a manager should have is seven to ten. Interestingly, Gallup recently reported that teams with fewer than ten members have both the highest and the lowest engagement across their database. They find that the level of engagement depends as much on the skills of the managers (team leaders) as it does on the team size. So, better managers will mean the possibility of an increased span of control, which has enormous implications on overall cost. How do companies make managers great? Maybe the missing link is by increasing the capability of team members.

In every organization I have worked in, no matter my level, I have been a team leader and a team member in almost equal measure. The context shifting between those roles is profound, and the skills needed to be a great team member do not totally overlap with those of being a great team leader. Team membership might be the panacea to our manager issue. What could the development of team members look like? Here are a few ideas:

• Find the team members that everyone wants and create more of them. There are individuals in your company whose names come up in every discussion about building a new team. If you asked just about anyone who is building a team, they would say, “I want them.” Find out who they are, what they do, and how they show up. Then, use that profile to build ideal team member skills in everyone else.
• Focus on developing the team together through teaming. We have become accustomed to building great managers by training them together. What if we flipped the script and focused our training dollars on teaching our teams “teaming?” What if we developed the manager and the team together in the context of how the company works? This is not a return to the 1980s trust falls and forming, storming, and norming. It is about helping create a working system so all the interactions between a team and the team leader are shared and both team leaders and team members are skilled to handle them. In other words, team leads should prioritize day-to-day interactions—one-on-one talks, coaching conversations, project launches, problem-solving sessions, etc.
• Assess for team membership in recruitment, regardless of level. Many leaders I have met have lost the skills of team membership—a bias for action, being a servant leader, building on others’ ideas, committing to a larger purpose, executing strategy, catching others doing great things, creating the space for others, and following through on deliverables. They are unable or unwilling to release control or give up the mic. Assessing that capability will ensure new joiners or long-timers are both great team leaders and model team members.

André Martin is an entrepreneur, organizational psychologist, and coach to founders and executives. He is author of Wrong Fit, Right Fit: Why How We Work Matters More Than Ever.