Leadership

Give your team time to think, before you meet. Create a safe space for sharing, and don’t allow ideas to be shot down. Look for opportunities to combine ideas and create new and better ones.

When fostering a culture of innovation, reward employees for taking ownership of their own problems and coming up with solutions. Encourage an outward view – looking for inspiration from the world outside the organisation. Give employees the scope to carry forward their own ideas as far as they are able.

Let your subconscious go to work – time pressure stifles creativity, which needs an incubation period. Be ready for ideas to flow at any time – always have a recording device or pen and paper with you, including during the night.

Act swiftly. Take prompt action to stop the problem getting worse, and take responsibility for dealing with the problem.

Communicate fully in a crisis. Know who you need to contact. Keep your team, customers and suppliers informed if they will be affected.

Consider how others are likely to react emotionally before you act. Recognise why and modify what you do accordingly. Encourage your team to be open about how they are feeling without responding to what they say negatively.

Be conscious of the impact that your emotional impulses have on your behaviour. Become more aware of your personal moods, emotions and drives and what causes them. Plan to avoid those situations which trigger negative emotions.

Recognise the effect your moods are having on others. Try to control disruptive impulses, perhaps by counting to ten or breathing slowly. Try to suspend judgment and think before acting. For example, don’t send emails when you’re angry.

How you behave matters. Your team will judge their workplace as ethical or not based on the way that you behave. Don’t compromise ethics for the sake of pressing business goals. Weigh up your options daily and choose the most ethical course of action.

Ethics are for everyday. Talk frequently about ethical values. Explain how these apply to the work of your team, and explain that being ethical means doing the right thing, even when you’re not required to.

Encourage your team to share their expertise. Be open to reverse mentoring, and identify good potential partners for mentoring… encourage them to establish clear goals and expectations.

Encourage debriefs after every success. Mistakes are fine, as long as you learn from them. Look at the reasons for difficulties and plan to avoid them in the future.

Only schedule a formal course when it represents the best way to address the learning need. Don’t use them to abdicate your responsibility for staff development. Follow-up and check progress.

Team leadership is all about setting team challenges, praising each member and making them feel like they matter.

Take the lead and don’t suppress ideas.

Give direction, provide support, provide challenges, give praise, define tasks, encourage ideas and resolve conflicts.

Being made to feel part of a team is important. Set team challenges, give praise and show each member they are valued.

Teams are made up of individuals. Show they matter and that they are important to the team and the project.

There are three steps managers should take to inspire their teams: give them confidence in the value of their specific role in the team, confidence in their value as individuals and confidence in their value as part of a team.

Jamie Oliver’s passion and vision transformed a bunch of unemployed kids into an efficient, organised team, capable of running a first-class London restaurant, Fifteen. The programme covers five key learning points backed up by real examples from Jamie’s journey. 1) Lead the way, 2) Believe in your team, 3) Take responsibility, 4) Learn and 5) Adapt.

Good leaders make sure that everyone who works for them is clear about what is expected of them, what their role is, the tasks they have to perform and the details of what really matters. A clear vision can carry a team through a project. To develop their vision, leaders have to rise up above the day-to-day work and look into the future.

Being a good leader means the dirty jobs can’t always be delegated. Sometimes you’ve got to get in there and show them how. Coaching is obviously a fundamental part of ‘showing them how’. The best leaders love to coach and train members of their teams. They get a real kick out of helping them develop their skills and grow in confidence.

Delegating jobs is one obvious way to give people responsibility, but it mustn’t be confused with abdication. Leaders can’t give everything away. “Believe in them” is a statement of philosophy; it has to be put into practice.

There are many things that leaders have to deal with, and most fall into one of the following three categories. They are: private fears, public faces and confrontation. ‘Dealing with it’ also means confronting problems within the team when they crop up.

Good leaders adapt their style to fit any situation. They learn from the things that go wrong, and the things that go right.

1) Lead the way
2) Believe in your team
3) Take responsibility
4) Learn
5) Adapt

We start to follow Jamie’s young trainee chefs as they move through the four stages of team development – forming, storming, norming and performing to come together as an effective unit.

Finding out the who, the what, the how and the why.

Teams understand and play to one another’s strengths. They tolerate and compensate for any weaknesses. They work together to solve problems and implement improvements.

During the storming period some people lose focus and are distracted. As pressure mounts, individuals in the storming process are inefficient, and forget what they were trained to do. Storming can teach valuable lessons.

At this stage groups of individuals really begin to operate as a team. They understand and accept the team’s purpose. They have developed and agreed on the ground rules – norms which govern how they work together. There’s less emotion.

A good leader is not afraid of conflict. Gather up the courage to tackle conflict swiftly – if you ignore the situation it will only get worse.
Remain calm and focus on the issues.
Listen to all sides of the argument, treating both parties with trust and respect.

A good leader is not desperate to be loved, so be prepared to make decisions that provide the best solution to a problem. Accept that you cannot be loved by everybody – this is one of the challenges of leadership. Look to improve the negative effects for people adversely affected parties but without compromising the decision.

A good leader cannot be a control freak. Don’t feel you have to make all the decisions just because you are the leader. Involve your team in important decisions or delegate to them. Give your team the space to breathe – a sense of autonomy is a great motivator.

A good leader is not a ditherer – make a quick decision when the situation demands it. Don’t be autocratic – involve others as needed. Be open to modify your decision if better information comes available.

A good leader can do small talk. Engage with the people you meet. Ask questions and show an interest. Look for mutual value from every relationship.

A good leader is not vain. Be confident about your strengths but aware of the room you have to improve as a leader. Be open to feedback from others about your role as a leader, and give credit to all those who contribute to successful performance.

Be prepared to deal with problems. When the chips are down, it’s you, the leader, who has to deal with the situation – don’t try and shift the blame down the line. When things go well, it’s the person who’s done the job that takes the credit. Find out what happened, why it happened and put it right.

Have a clear vision. Recognise that if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re likely to end up somewhere else. As a leader you need a vision of where you want your organisation or department to go. Involve your team in clarifying your vision.

Show them how it’s done. You need to model the behaviour you want others to adopt. Be visible – not stuck in an office somewhere. Setting an example means not avoiding the unpleasant jobs, so show you can get your hands dirty.

Show you believe in your team. Look out for actions that deserve praise and be quick to do it. If you need to point out problems or mistakes, show faith in the person’s ability to get it right. Don’t give up on them – you’re always looking to build belief and confidence.

Avoid the ego barrier to decision making. Don’t take it all upon yourself. Your ego could be a big obstacle to team thinking.

Once you have developed a sharply focussed question and given yourself choices, you need to assess your options. Imagine the future and the best, and worst, case outcomes.

When you’re making team decisions, first develop a sharply focussed question. Then give yourself choices. Be flexible, avoiding rigor mentis – a rigid mind.

When forming a team, take a strong role in directing them. Establish objectives and responsibilities, and build good relationships. Storming will mean you must resolve conflicts, provide support and remain firm in the face of challenges.

In the Norming stage, take a step back and help team members to take further responsibility. Share controversial views and address difficult issues.

During the Performing stage, give the team space to make decisions for themselves. Recognise contributions and award credit where due.

John Cleese challenges some misconceptions about mistakes and introduces the thought-provoking idea that mistakes are a crucial part of the creative process.