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How to Get Your Teammates to Follow Your Lead

workaguide.com

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Re: How to Get Your Teammates to Follow Your Lead

#11

Post by BSVino »

TinyBig wrote: post #2

Curious if anyone here has seen success with the first step, "Get Approval From Leadership". I tend to favor "ask for forgiveness, not permission". Nobody is more resistant to change than middle management, so I tend to jump straight to small-scale adoption and coalition building.

Hello. Article author here. You can do this and it might be the appropriate approach in some situations, but you run the risk of degrading your reputation with management. Putting aside the personal risk, I tend to think of maintaining your reputation with your teammates as more important in the long run than accomplishing something or being right about any particular issue, since it preserves your ability to persuade them in the future.

Also I've found that if management is resistant to change they usually have good reasons, even if sometimes they can't or won't share them, so circumventing them can sometimes be counter-productive. Usually better to just be on the up-and-up.

Re: How to Get Your Teammates to Follow Your Lead

#12

Post by BSVino »

badminton1 wrote: post #9

The goal should not be to have people follow your lead. The goal should be: get your team to follow good ideas, and not follow bad ideas. No matter who proposed them. Smart people often have good ideas, but they can have bad ideas as well and a team needs to be prepared to reject them. Likewise, the lowest ranking person in the organization can have a trillion dollar idea and your organization should be prepared to p…

Hello. Article author here. I agree, people should only follow good ideas. I didn't explicitly mention this in the article, but I believe that a person in a healthy work environment who genuinely follows the process of feedback as outlines will eventually turn their bad or mediocre ideas into good ideas as they integrate feedback, or else the leadership won't approve their change and the team will refuse to adopt the idea. After all, it's tough to get people to voluntarily adopt a bad idea.

Re: How to Get Your Teammates to Follow Your Lead

#14

Post by marmaduke »

peterkelly wrote: post #7

Totally missing from the article is any notion that the tool or thing you're trying to push might not actually be a great idea. The assumption seems to be that the author was Right (TM) and all that remained to address was the challenge of getting others to see the one true path. If you're trying to convince others to make a change, and they're pushing back, listen to those concerns and revisit whether or not the cha…

The article is predicated on the suitability of the tool to be adopted, in the first paragraph, so he omission seems fine.

Obviously there are cases where the tool being pushed isn’t right, but that’s a completely different albeit important discussion.

Re: How to Get Your Teammates to Follow Your Lead

#15

Post by newfoundglory »

BSVino wrote: post #12
badminton1 wrote: post #9

The goal should not be to have people follow your lead. The goal should be: get your team to follow good ideas, and not follow bad ideas. No matter who proposed them. Smart people often have good ideas, but they can have bad ideas as well and a team needs to be prepared to reject them. Likewise, the lowest ranking person in the organization can have a trillion dollar idea and your organization should be prepared to p…

Hello. Article author here. I agree, people should only follow good ideas. I didn't explicitly mention this in the article, but I believe that a person in a healthy work environment who genuinely follows the process of feedback as outlines will eventually turn their bad or mediocre ideas into good ideas as they integrate feedback, or else the leadership won't approve their change and the team will refuse to adopt the…

Unfortunately I've seen people much more eager to adopt a bad idea that is easier in the short term than a good idea that involves hard or boring work - like "should we refactoring and build on our existing code or throw it out and start again?", where people vote for throwing it out because "I don't even understand this code!"

Re: How to Get Your Teammates to Follow Your Lead

#16

Post by watwut »

marmaduke wrote: post #14
peterkelly wrote: post #7

Totally missing from the article is any notion that the tool or thing you're trying to push might not actually be a great idea. The assumption seems to be that the author was Right (TM) and all that remained to address was the challenge of getting others to see the one true path. If you're trying to convince others to make a change, and they're pushing back, listen to those concerns and revisit whether or not the cha…

The article is predicated on the suitability of the tool to be adopted, in the first paragraph, so he omission seems fine. Obviously there are cases where the tool being pushed isn’t right, but that’s a completely different albeit important discussion.

The opposition might have good reason to opposing you, despite you being convinced you are right initially. As in, while you are pushing for that thing, be willing to listen to them, especially to those in roles different then your role, in case you are just about to cause them problems. You will just do more damage otherwise.

Re: How to Get Your Teammates to Follow Your Lead

#18

Post by some_account »

flyinglizard wrote: post #13

The point about leadership capital is excellent and stands very true.

I agree, the writer put this process into very nice wording. I've seen other people use this process to gain informal leadership but I never saw it described in quite this way. Very nice.

Re: How to Get Your Teammates to Follow Your Lead

#19

Post by hevi_jos »

Good leaders know if you want others doing something to you, you come first.

If you want others following your lead, first you follow the lead of great leaders, listen to them, learn from them what makes them so great. Then you could be a great leader.

From my point of view, the article is egocentric. Ego is one of the biggest enemies of good work.

It should never be about following the leader blindly, specially if you manage(or co-work) smart, educated and experienced people, their opinions are of more value than yours in their areas of experience.

With ego over the table it is only about who wins the argument, and of course it is always the boss(who is up in the hierarchical level). Beware because this introduces resentment and procrastination on the team.

The article promotes this method, but this is not leadership, it is subjugation.

Re: How to Get Your Teammates to Follow Your Lead

#20

Post by codingdave »

Or... first get the team to acknowledge the problem and agree that a fix is needed. Then have everyone research solutions. Propose your tool while asking what other solutions have been found. As a team, talk about the pros/cons of each option, and facilitate those discussions. Build consensus by listening and understanding what your team has to say. Once you agree on the solution, talk through the configuration questions. Then talk through a deployment and adoption plan.

Because if you just want the problem fixed, then it isn't an issue of manipulating corporate politics to support your lead... it is an issue of working together to come up with a shared solution.

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