It’s one thing having a great plan on paper, and another making sure it comes to fruition.

Even if you’ve worked hard alongside your team to set clear goals and made sure all the team understands them, actual delivery can throw up all kinds of unexpected events. Your role as leader is to make sure the team has what it needs to get through them.

Here are four ways you, as a manager and leader, can help your team to excel.

1. Co-ordinate across the organisation

According to Timothy Francis, project manager at Veterans Affairs Canada and author of the book 'Lean for Public Servants', a key role for a leader during delivery is co-ordination.

“If your organisation, as mine is, is laid out hierarchically,” he said, “then when you get down to that four to 20 person team group, it’s not always convenient for them to always talk to the other four to 20 person groups on an ongoing basis.”

The role of a leader, therefore, is to understand when and why meetings need to take place, and to co-ordinate efficient, effective meetings between a handful of people, with information disseminated in advance and a clear purpose.

“It’s not about stopping your team communicating with their counterparts elsewhere,” Francis said, “but about making sure those conversations don’t happen haphazardly.”

2. Engineer alignment

For Francis, “alignment, I would say, is making sure everyone is moving in the same direction.”

He gave the example of a project he is currently working on, which “has somewhere between four and six sub-projects under it, depending on how you divide it, and each of those has its own team.” It’s the role of a team leader to help make sure these different teams are pulling together.

But how to do that in practice? For Francis, it’s about ensuring everyone is clear about the problem they are trying to solve. Is there a problem or mission statement in place? If so, does your team understand it, and can they relate their current activities to it? If not, where is the confusion?

While Francis’s current work is more frontline, he used to work in the department’s HR function. A challenge to alignment there was ensuring that his teams understood the link between the backroom work they were doing, and the overall goal at the time of improving health outcomes for veterans.

3. Communicate up and down the organisation

While your team gets on with the work, it’s your job to keep other levels of the organisation aware of what they’re doing. For example, if an objective needs to be reframed or more resources allocated, you’re going to need to discuss that with those higher up the organisation.

But how do you do this without introducing extra burdens into your team’s work? For Francis, it’s about making sure you have the right “intel” about what your team is working on.

Francis gives an example of a “decision rights matrix” he and others created for the project he is currently working on. It codifies four activities that take place relating to any decision: providing input, being notified of the decision, making the decision or ratifying the decision.

The person or people responsible for each of these can then be entered into the matrix and superiors can understand what is taking place, without the need for burdensome conversations or checking with the team.

4. Establish trust

For Hilary Hartley, Chief Digital and Data Officer at the Cabinet Office in Ontario, a big part of helping teams to work autonomously but effectively, and without feeling overwhelmed, is establishing a deep sense of trust between the team and their leader.

That way, even if there is confusion or doubt at any point about exactly what has to be done, the level of trust means different members of the team are able to speak frankly to each other or to their leader to establish what’s needed.

She often tells the story of a major success her team had in reforming a health information website in her province. The site — intended to explain which treatments were covered by public health plans and which weren’t — was full of technical information about different drugs but didn’t answer this simple question for users.

Hartley’s team knew they could fix it by diverting just a little resource, and managed to change the way the site’s search functioned so it fulfilled this simple aim. The first she heard of it was when other senior executives at her level began informing her of the excellent work. It’s an example, Hartley said, of what a team can achieve when they have the autonomy and trust to operate effectively.

Part of this, too, is providing “psychological safety”, she said: helping people to feel they can bring their “whole selves” to work. This is one upside of increased remote working: encouraging team members to bring family members to calls or bring you into their home life can help to build these bonds.

High levels of accountability can lead to a risk-averse culture in government, where people are afraid to try things for fear of something going wrong. Fostering an environment where people feel safe and supported can improve both effectiveness and wellbeing.

Key takeaways:

  • To ensure alignment across teams, make sure everyone is clear about the problem they are trying to solve.
  • While your team gets on with the work, it’s your job to keep other levels of the organisation aware of what they’re doing.
  • Trust between a leader and their team is key — fostering an environment where people feel safe and supported can improve both effectiveness and wellbeing.
  • In summary, the four ingredients for empowering your team to excel are coordination, alignment, communication and trust.

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