Lead Role or Leadership Behaviors & Mindset

I wanted to write this post as I have worked across a lot of really large organisations and experienced many different operating models and role structures. Its been very common from what I have seen to have various levels of hierarchy built into the whole organisation, for this post I would like to focus on the roles(hierarchy) within the delivery teams themselves.

Within a lot of teams I have worked in, there is one type of role that jumps out more than anything and that is the role of ‘Lead’. This role type is applied to many different functional roles within teams…

Firstly I would like to explore why these roles might exist in the first place and what problems might the role type have been trying to solve.

The problems/challenges above are not the only ones, just the ones I have experienced most often. It’s always a good practice to actually explore the problems first before moving to solution space. Based on the above I wanted to explore these areas and what affect the implementation of a Lead role might have as well as the other options available. Let’s start with..

If people are going off in different directions without being open and transparent, this can cause…

One way to tackle this is to put a control structure in place like a ‘Lead’. This person can be there to make decisions and ensure that people are doing the right thing at the right time. I believe this however is only tackling the symptom and not the actual problem. In my experience this can result in the following for the ‘Lead’…

And results in this for the ‘Team’…

In the above, I wanted to explore on a deeper level the behaviors and mindset this one solution could cause. Let’s now look at people not having the opportunity to grow in the team…

It’s important in any organisation to pay close attention to how you will grow and retain your talent. This is an area of concern for a lot of organisations and one way most organisations do this is by building ‘Levels’ for the people to climb.

I am fairly confident that a structure like the one below will be very familiar to a lot of people. Let’\s explore these levels and see what might happen to someone who tries to progress in a structure like this..

From seeing these types of career structures many times, they are often very limiting to the person and limits their growth and potential. I would recommend moving away from this and moving towards a craft focused growth approach that allows people to progress into their passion. It will also help your organisation to grow and enables people to be valued for their true worth.

Finally I would like to explore seeing and shaping the big picture, as well as people not stepping up in situations of need…

One strong reason for having the ‘Lead’ that I have experienced is to have someone who spends more time on the ‘Big Picture’ for that area. Strategical thinking is an important thing; I’m sure we can all agree on that, however I would like to see how this might play out..

The above shows the most common experiences I have seen by applying the ‘Lead’ role to solve this problem. I would advocate that we could also do the following to help solve this problem which may be more effective for the team and enables whole team growth…

In order to achieve the above you would still need to play around with the ‘how’ a little to find what works for your system but I believe it would enable greater growth for the whole team. I didn’t get a chance to explore all potential problem areas however hopefully this is a good start.

I would like to close by saying that none of the above has to play out just because the ‘Lead’ role is present. I would like to explore the problems we are facing into, and go deeper in on understanding if the role and the person in that role actually helps us or doesn’t. Are you looking for a ‘Lead’ or a team that demonstrates ‘Leadership’ qualities? And what’s the best way to get this?

Don’t focus on the solution, explore the problems at a deeper level 🙂

Thanks for reading.

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