The Challenges of DIY Leadership Development

In his HBR article What to Do About Mediocrity on Your Team [icon name=”external-link” class=”” unprefixed_class=””], Joseph Grenny observed, “The toughest test of a manager is not how they deal with poor performance — it’s how they address mediocrity.” Over the course of many, many conversations with team leaders from around the world, I’ve found Grenny’s observation to hold true. While it is tempting to immediately suggest practices that can help team leaders move team members from merely average to exceptional, there are valuable insights to be gained by examining why addressing mediocrity can be so challenging. Grenny’s hypothesis that chronic mediocrity is a symptom of ineffective leadership is a good starting point. It raises the question of how organizations end up with ineffective team leaders – at least in terms of addressing mediocrity – and what can they do about it.

In discussions with team leaders whose teams would be considered mediocre by any reasonably objective standard, I consistently received two answers to questions about their team’s average performance. First, many team leaders consistently rated themselves and their teams as better than average — even when presented with evidence that showed the effectiveness of their team to be average at best versus peer teams. For team leaders that demonstrate this bias, the results are predictable – a lack of learning from mistakes and stunted improvements in people’s performance. The second answer was along the lines of “… unless someone is performing really poorly, I don’t have time, nor do I get much organizational support, to do anything about it.” While many team leaders can relate to the challenges of overloaded schedules and unsupportive managers or HR departments, acknowledging mediocrity and doing nothing to address it is clearly not a leadership best practice.

When I probed further to uncover the underlying reasons for these views on managing average-at-best team member performance, I saw that for many leaders the issue could be traced back to their early team leader experiences. For most of these people, their development as team leaders could be described as predominately DIY (Do-It-Yourself). DIY as an approach to leader development is not in itself flawed – with quality information, effort, and a supportive context people can learn to become good managers. However, the challenge for most people is that they don’t know what they don’t know, and as a result their approach to DIY team leadership misses several essentials – especially around understanding and managing team member motivation and performance.

The Challenges of DIY Leadership Development

There are good reasons why professions such as medicine, law, and psychology have rigorous development programs. One is to ensure a minimum level of quality across the profession. Another is that developing expertise in any field requires an understanding of that discipline’s foundations and best practices. Leader development is no different. When organizations leave team leader development up to the individual, too few new leaders put the time or energy into developing their own point-of-view on leadership best practices. Moreover, they will rarely focus on using a external team development model to support their point of view, and benchmark how they are doing implementing it. Most will claim that they are too busy trying to survive and thrive in their new role. The result is inconsistency in team leadership practices across an organization, and team leaders who are more likely to fall prey to the reality distortions that come from cognitive biases or blaming others when it comes to assessing their team member’s performance. Unlike in a sport like tennis, where any attempts at reality distortion are stripped away by the end of the first set, team leaders without a best practices-based point of view, and a strong foundation for team development, can rationalize mediocre performance over long periods of time.

Filling in the DIY Gaps

Digital technologies, the emergence of new global competition, and the expectations of the next generation of workers are but a few of the driving forces reshaping businesses around the world. For many companies, it is their teams and team leaders that sit at the epicentre of this dynamic landscape. Those teams will, to a large extent, determine where their organizations land in the distribution from mediocre to great. Yet, despite the importance of their role and the pressures to perform it well, the reality today for many first-level leaders is that development is mostly DIY. There are the occasional off-site training sessions, and in larger organizations, there may be an online “University” of mostly webinars and links to articles. In most cases, the leadership models being used are relics of the 20^th century with a focus on leader-centric hierarchies. The result is that DIY team leaders are typically missing three essential elements for consistently overcoming mediocrity and developing a highly-effective 21st-century team:

Mediocrity is a Choice

With a robust team development model and checklist, a leader has the external benchmarks for objectively comparing his or her team’s performance across the important fundamentals that make up the foundation of a highly-effective team. Regular peer feedback is the fuel that drives change. Team leaders who consistently identify and commit to closing team member experience-expectation gaps among their peers develop the one habit which will significantly impact team effectiveness. Given the opportunity, and framed correctly, peers will be diligent in calling out behaviours that prevent achieving the team’s purpose and their own goals. Last, the path from mediocre performer to high-performance is one of mapping the purpose and goals of the team to the individual and ensuring that the team member has the competencies to realize that purpose, and the freedom to do so. If the purpose doesn’t align, or competencies are not or can not be developed, then the team member will not be motivated to improve. As a team leader you can choose the path to team excellence by developing the habits of benchmarking your team versus best practices, gathering regular team feedback, and maximizing team member motivation and performance – or you can choose to accept mediocrity on your team. As observed by Aristotle “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

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