Note from Art: I’ve long wanted to establish a consistent blog feature focused on helping first-time leaders navigate this challenging career stage, and here it is. New Leader Tuesday will focus specifically on the topics that all of us face as we take on this most difficult of all business challenges…leading others. In addition to this regular blog feature, I’m launching the New Leader e-newsletter and have some more programs slated to announce in the near future. Join us here at the blog for New Leader Tuesday, and register for the subscriber only-content via our newsletter. (We never share your e-mail information.)

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Many first-time leaders are given the equivalent of “battlefield” promotions with no more context than, “You’ve done a great job, you’re in charge.”  If you end up on the receiving side of this “Go get ‘em Tiger,” philosophy of leadership development, it’s important for you to quickly gain context for your team’s role and accountabilities.

If no one volunteers this information, it’s up to you to piece together the information and then arm your team with it. Leading is one heck of a lot easier if everyone understands the mission!

Katie (real person, different name) ended up in one of these “Hey, you’re smart, you’re in charge,” promotions with little guidance and absolutely no context for accountabilities. Here’s how she handled it:

We move at hyper-speed in this business. We all understand our day-to-day jobs, but once I was placed in a lead role, I wanted to gain a better picture of how our performance was measured, how we fit into the bigger picture of the firm’s goals and even what my direct manager’s goals were, so that I could align the team and give feedback around these measures.

Through a series of interviews with my manager (when I could catch her), and my peers…and my internal customers, I was able to piece together a better understanding of how we fit into the picture and what people required and expected of us. I built a crude scorecard to use with the team and when my manager and her manager saw what I was doing, they actually jumped in and helped me improve the scorecard. It’s now a standard tool used with similar teams in our different locations. It keeps us all focused on the work that matters, and it keeps us striving for improvement.  And all I did was start asking the right questions.

Katie did more than ask the right questions, and it appears that her manager had good insight in tapping this smart and aggressive person on the shoulder to lead. She used some of the questions outlined in Practical Lessons in Leadership to help her get going.

Key Questions For Katie’s Direct Manager:

  • What are our firm’s key strategies and goals?
  • What are your goals?
  • How does my team impact the company goals and your personal goals?
  • What are we accountable for? How are you measuring us?
  • What is your perception of how well this team has been executing in recent quarters?
  • How will I be evaluated as the manager?
  • What latitude do I have to make changes on the team to better align with the goals.
  • What time constraints am I operating under?

Key Questions For Katie’s Cross Functional Peers (Internal Customers):

  • In your experience working with my team, what works? What is broken?
  • What do you wish we would do better? (Prioritize)
  • Are we aligned on the firm’s goals?
  • What are your team’s goals and how do we impact your achievement? (Here are my team’s goals…let’s compare and contrast.)
  • How do our combined activities impact our other internal/external customers?
  • Do we have formal communication between our two teams to ensure that we get and stay on the same page?
  • Are there shared measures of performance that might help us monitor our work together?

The Bottom-Line for Now:

For any leader, mastering the art of asking good questions is a critical success skill. In Katie’s case and in the case of any new front-line leader, gaining context for your team’s mission, accountabilities and key measures is important. Sharing this information with your team and creating tools to measure and monitor performance around these key issues is critical. Be politely relentless in seeking answers to these highly relevant questions.

We’ll cover questions for market-facing teams and external customers in a follow-on post.