These Lessons Learned are intended to provide insight from the outcomes of real life leadership experiences. Some experiences worked well. Others, not so much. For any given leadership effort, regardless of the outcome ... there was then, is now and always will be valuable post event learnings.

Leadership Failure 101 - Lead WITH the Team, Don't Lead FOR Them

Leadership Failure 101 - Lead WITH the team, Don't lead FOR them

It was early in my management career. I had just completed my first introductory course into the world of Performance Management (PM). I was psyched and had the perfect plan to introduce my team to the new concept. I scheduled an off-site half-day session to deliver the background training to them and kick-off our first use of PM. Two hours of instruction later, we immediately dove into a team discussion about what we needed to measure. The team decided we'd measure test completion output.

(Note: Everything went well until this point. Then I took over and completely shut down their participation and creative involvement. Here's what I did.)

I announced that this is what we'd do. For every test completed this next week, the person who completed the test would personally drop a RED 1/2 inch fuzzy pompom ball into a clear vertical tube measuring 2 inches in diameter by 3 feet tall. The next week, we'd use a YELLOW ball, and so on using different colored balls each week. The idea would include personal involvement from all team members while providing immediate feedback with a visual metric. There was total silence. They just stared at me. Well, you guessed the rest of the story. We never did utilize the exercise back in the lab. I ended up with a bunch of fuzzy pompom balls and clear plastic tubes.

Epilogue: So where did I go wrong? My motivation and excitement were excellent. My basic thought was good. My execution was absolutely terrible.

• First: I gave my team the Performance Management training, but didn't let them use these new tools to complete the task. If I would have allowed the team to devised the measurement system, it would have been theirs. They would have owned it, nurtured it, used it and learned from it.
• Second: We never discussed what we would do differently to reduce test times and increase lab throughput after we had the performance data. This exercise was just an activity. It wasn't part of a larger plan with defined actionable follow-on steps.

Ultimately we did roll-out performance management with wildly successful results. But, this time I allowed the team to fully participate in the entire cycle where they defined the need, the PM design, it's implementation and the actionable outcome definitions.

Sidenote: Several years later when I moved on to another leadership position, my team presented me with a trophy. It had three basketball players with one of them holding the ball. My team had kept a few of the pompoms from years before and glued them around the basketball. The inscription on the base of the trophy read ... "Quality Leadership Team (Positive Reinforcement)". That trophy has been on every desk I've had since. It's a constant reminder to ... Lead WITH the team, Don't lead FOR them.