Adapting Your Leadership as Your Team Grows
When starting out in a management role, your focus is on forging positive relationships with your team members, getting involved in projects, and generally being a ‘hands-on’ manager. But how do you evolve when your team starts to grow beyond one person’s reach? It’s impossible to be everywhere at once – despite our best efforts – and your leadership style must change accordingly.
Over the many years of recruiting for Heads of Departments and Partners, we have seen the whole range of leadership styles and in this article, we present our thoughts on successfully leading a larger team.
- Learn to Manage Indirectly
Larger teams make it impossible for you to have close contact with every employee and project under your purview in the same way you might be used to. As a result, learning to effectively delegate is an important step to take to help everyone in your department feel supported. Assigning further responsibilities to people you trust to lead effectively can be difficult, but you should trust that you have developed your new leaders well enough to realise your strategy goals.
- Leave Perfectionism Behind
Following from the previous point, to lead a growing team, you must leave behind notions that your way is always the right and only way to do things. Becoming a more indirect manager means sacrificing total control for an extended reach. People under indirect supervision are going to do things in a different way than you; this is inevitable. Trust that the training you provided has given them the ability to achieve your overarching goals, even if they arrive at this goal via a different path.In order to be successful in this, communication is key. Increase the frequency and means of communication with your team. Regular updates, meetings, and feedback sessions with your direct supervisors ensure that everyone is aligned and informed. Use tools such as Slack, email, and project management software to maintain transparency.
- Understand Power Dynamics
No matter how approachable you might be as a person, it can be difficult to overcome the power dynamics within a team. Of course, maintaining authority over your team is important, but this can also cause social challenges. In a larger team where your personal relationships are not as close, the manager can seem like an intimidating, faraway figure. As a result of this, your employees might be less likely to give constructive criticism or be 100% truthful for fear of recrimination. To combat this, ensure you are still promoting an open and honest culture, where thoughts and contributions are equally valued.
- Cultivate Mental Agility
Managing a growing team likely means you will be overseeing a greater volume of projects. Large blocks of time spent working on a single project will likely become few and far between; and the need for jumping between subjects will only grow. Thus, you must develop your mental agility – but what does this look like? Leaders such as Julie Zhou, Facebook’s VP of Design, develop their own task management systems, and carve out time at the beginning of a day to prepare and run through the projects they will be looking at. Understanding how you work, and which organisational methods work best for you will help you accomplish this. Taking small steps, such as these, levels up your ability to multitask and navigate the requirements of leading a large team.
- People-Centric Management
As you move further from the day-to-day nuances of your team’s work, you require less technical knowledge of their work and more knowledge of people; how they work, how to motivate them, and how to help them achieve results. If you as a manager can get the best out of your team then you can excel as a leader of any team, no matter how large.
This last point is possibly the most critical in maintaining a successful team and managing growth. We have worked with some exceptional leaders with highly developed Emotional Intelligence and a natural communication style, which trickles down through the team leaders they manage, and the attorneys beneath them.
Evolving as a manager is a difficult and nonlinear process and we all make missteps along the way. For a successful manager, the aim should always be to get the best out of your employees. Implementing the above strategies can hopefully support you in being a successful, indirect leader capable of handling the challenges that accompany large teams.
