Leading Internal teams with Trust, Transparency and Flexibility

Trust, Transparency and Flexibility has worked great with our external customers, to me if this is something that the external customers buy from us then there is no reason to believe that it will not work for my internal customers. In the note below I have tried to draw a congruence of this philosophy to my internal management style.

I will try and explain each one of the three but before I start let me lay two golden rules - management or no management "Respect the Individuals". If you cannot respect an individual be it in your personal or professional life you have lost it as a leader before the start of the game.

Let me now start with Trust, this is the first and the foremost thing in building a winning relationship. Many times I hear people saying that a person has just joined hence he needs to prove his credibility in due time to have the trust of the manager and the organization. To me this is weird. The reason that he is onboard after qualifying the multiple rounds of interview itself is enough proof for him to be trusted. Unless he does something that breaks his credibility there is no reason not to trust him. People live in a fear and a non-trust environment for many months that actually deters their performance and lessens the appetite to risk taking. Also with trust comes delegation. Delegation does not mean to take decisions yourself and then have your team agree to it which I see many people doing; to me it means to give the power to the right people to even make some wrong decisions while helping them learn from the mistakes. Believe in your coaching and the people’s capability, you will have to trust your team with deep waters and leave them to swim.

Hence rule 1 - Trust your team day one unless proved otherwise.

Transparency - To me transparency means to be able to admit and share the good and the bad with your team. I personally believe that basic nature of all human are alike, if failure hurts me I am sure it hurts other as well and the pat on the back make all of us feel good. Having transparency creates an environment where people can admit failures and not be afraid of trying something new. Also this helps in identifying the issues early and reacting proactively. Be open to admit your mistakes in front of the team, this will surely help them open up. There is nothing wrong in not knowing, what is wrong is not knowing and not asking. Create an environment where people can stand up and ask basic questions. It is difficult to admit that we do not know basics or to overcome the fear of what others will think, but if you have accomplished that in your team you are a winner and you have a winning team behind you because the answers to the most complex problems in the world lie in simple basic questions.

Rule 2 - Create an environment that helps people admit the mistakes and encourages them to ask questions without any fear.

Flexibility - As I have already mentioned in one of my blog below, flexibility should be viewed as an organization’s or a managers open mindset to listen and adapt to changing environment by enabling framework to re-define the processes. It is very important to be receptive to change and new ideas. The change is inevitable the question is - can you impact the change in a positive way. I do believe there is no one correct way of doing things, someone could any day discover a better way of doing things than what you did in the past, trust the team with the flexibility of trying new ideas. Balance flexibility to have a positive effect to create a learning environment.

Rule 3 - Be flexible to accommodate innovation but not at the cost of making the exception a rule.

Before I end I must state the second golden rule that I defined in the first paragraph. The second golden rule is "Listen Listen Listen". Unless you listen to your team and the people around you it will be difficult to make the positive impact. Many times you may not have an answer to the questions but a patient listening works wonder!!

Happy Leading.