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Leaders: Want to Know What Your Team Really Needs?
Stop asking and start reading them
It’s easy to feel like a leader just because you have followers, but if the people who follow you aren’t happy, then you’re not doing your job.
I was working with a team on a project that involved a lot of really complex technical work. I knew the team members were far more experienced than me in those areas, so I sort of sat back and let them take the lead.
Every so often, I’d ask if they needed anything from me, and they’d say, “No, it’s fine!” until one day when suddenly, it wasn’t. They started asking for a lot of information, and I realized that because I had just been letting them be in charge, they hadn’t been telling me what they needed from me.
The obvious lesson here is to keep checking in with your teammates about what you can do to help them do their jobs better.
But the more nuance lesson is…
