Thoughts For Department And Team Leaders

Stepping into leadership changes the nature of our role.

Success becomes less about what we personally accomplish and more about what we enable others to accomplish with us. 

We rarely choose the numbers we are measured against, but we’re expected to hit them anyway, with a budget, a team and a set of internal and external customers to manage along the way.

Whether our department leader responsibility was ever framed as running a business within an organisation or not, that is effectively what it is.

This means we need to understand the business, work effectively with people, make choices about scarce resources and create the conditions in which others want to work with us to make our department a success.

Many leaders build the commercial and people capability by doing, often after being promoted for functional strength rather than leadership skill, which takes time and can leave gaps.

Here are some thoughts.

Don’t Do It

Don’t accept a leadership and customer facing role if you don’t want to invest much of your time with others and if you don’t want to run a business.

Actually this isn’t really an option.

Because all of us are in customer facing roles. 

All of us have stakeholders, many are internal customers.

Our line manager is one of our most important customers.

And all of us are in business.

We all have to deliver something to someone.

And we never have limitless resources available to us to deliver what we must deliver.

And we never operate in isolation.

We always need at least some help from others.

And we need to find ways to lead others, most of whom don’t report to us. 

And they don’t have to go out of their way to help us. 

And we get a lot more help when they want to help us.

We can choose a role that requires not so much of our energy on commercial considerations, communication and collaboration. 

But we can never fully eliminate it.

How well developed is our business and people acumen?

And how do we want to allocate our energy?

Are We In Too Deep?

Are we actually drowning in too much volume or choosing to have no breathing room because we haven't found a more strategic way forward?

Is getting each task done, each report out, each fire extinguished and each request attended to really a way of rationalising our distance from a state that we feel we ought to be at but which we haven't yet figured out how to reach?

If that's the case it's very understandable as I don't think the leap is taught very well.

Too much of our career destiny comes down to how fortunate or not we are to find a senior colleague that helps show us a way that could work for us.

And finding that individual is a particular challenge because many senior colleagues themselves haven't yet found a way to be more strategic.

The big picture is so easily lost in a sea of operational volume.

It takes determination to shift our state, and it begins with the reality of where we are today.

Are we clear headed enough about where we are, or are we too deep in the operational to see it?

Allocating Our Assets

Consciously or otherwise, we're always making choices.

And not all choices are equal.

We never have endless reserves of cash, time, energy and attention.

We have many ways to allocate the assets we do have.

Some steps hardly move us forward.

Perfection burns resource.

Bad choices destroy progress.

Sometimes we catch sight of a good outcome with reasonable certainty and modest cost.

We need to really go for it when we do.

How proactive and deliberate are we in finding those big leaps forward for modest investments and risk?

What Would They Say?

The answers to human questions matter as much as strategic ones. 

Feelings drive behaviours.

What would they say?

About us.

Are we as an individual, are we as a team, are we as an organisation, both energising to work with and energising to work for?

If all the answers are yes, we're in a great place.

If any of the answers are no, why and what are we going to do about it?

Curriculum For Your Short Free Programme

    1. Welcome To Outperformance Highway

    2. About This Exercise

    3. Learning From What's Come Before

    4. A Quick Question

    1. We Are That Author

    2. Thinking Energy Allocation

    3. Are We On The Right Path For Us?

    4. What About The Numbers?

    1. So What Will Our Recipe Be?

    2. Who Will Build All Those Bridges?

    3. The First Principle, This Is What We Do

    4. The Orchestration Of Execution

    5. Strategies For Influencing Culture

    1. Rounding Out Our Team

    2. A Way Forward

About this course

  • Free

All of the above is drawn from 35+ years working inside 150+ businesses worldwide. It's not theory, it's what I discovered and observed working and where I saw people come unstuck.


'Luck may play a part but outperformance is never a fluke.'


- Rob Evans, Founder, Outperformance Highway