Amy's Story

Amy had been the strongest performer on her team. No one disputed that.

So when their boss was promoted, it came as no surprise to those outside the team that Amy was selected to take over as the team lead. For the others inside the team, there was outward support and inward jealously. Not unexpected if you’ve ever been in that situation.

It was her first managerial position and she wanted to get it right. And she was smart enough to understand that it wasn’t going to be easy taking over the team. 

So she read about leadership. And she read about management. It all made perfect sense. 

However.

Her newly announced “open door” policy became divisive. Half of her team was in her office every few hours asking her to make decisions. The other half was nowhere to be seen. It wasn’t working quite as smoothly as she had hoped.

When she started delegating, it was piecemeal. Her team thought that they had become her dumping ground. They resented it.  

Then when she started delegating more comprehensive, strategic responsibilities, she wasn’t confident that she had everyone’s trust. So she kept an eye on everything. The word ‘micromanager’ started being whispered behind her back.

She tried consensus building. What could be more empowering for her team? That simply became a series of regular meetings where everyone argued and nothing was decided.

How could this be so hard?

She had been the best performer on the team. She was smart. She was hard working. And she was in over her head. 

When she had only herself to worry about, it was easy. She made sure that she negotiated clear responsibilities with her boss. In every case, she knew her objective, authority, constraints, and the key results that defined success. This created an environment where she and her boss trusted each other. And she was able to deliver her best work.

And that’s when she saw it. 

She and her team didn’t have that relationship yet. She needed to create it.

Instead, she had gotten into minutiae like open door policies and consensus building because that’s the advice that’s out there. But those things had never been an explicit part of her great relationship with her prior boss. And none of those things had any impact on her ability to deliver great work. Now, she recognized that she had gotten seduced by well-meaning but irrelevant management advice.

She recognized that she had abandoned the things she understood about performance when she was a high level Contributor

In fact, she was still a Contributor. She now saw that this didn’t go away just because she was promoted. She still had responsibilities to deliver results to her (new) boss. They were different responsibilities because of her promotion, of course. But how she handled them hadn’t changed one bit.

Only now, she no longer had the option of simply executing on her own. She needed to rely on the help of her team. 

And the same things that she valued when she was a team member needed to become part of the performance environment for everyone else. She had to simply switch her point of view. One moment, she’s a Contributor talking with her boss. She’s negotiating responsibilities, constraints, and key results. The next moment, she’s meeting with members of her team. And she needed to be doing exactly the same thing. It’s just that now she’s the Lead -  sitting on the other side of the table, teaching her team how performance works in the real world. She needed to help them see how they, too, can become high performers by negotiating and owning responsibilities. That’s how they, too, will build commitment, trust, and engagement just as she had.  

At that realization, everything slowed down for her. She was no longer in over her head.  She saw the process more clearly. Her confidence shot up. She already knew how to do this as a Contributor. And, as Lead, she could make it the operating system for her team. She would make mistakes along the way. But now she knew that she could forgive herself and move on because she confidently knew that she wasn’t an imposter. She absolutely could do this. 

She simply needed to activate her team’s performance in the same way that she had previously activated her own. 

It’s a recursive fractal. The same formula of success works at every level. With every team. The leader simply sits in the middle of the mission chain. Sometimes they’re looking up the chain to understand the results they need to deliver. Other times they’re looking down the mission chain to delegate key activities that will help her deliver on those responsibilities. And, through it all, she’s teaching each member of her team how to deliver their best work both now, and when they become leaders in the future.

That’s what this section of TRM is about.