First-Time Leader: Foundational Tools for Inspiring and Enabling Your New Team

CHAPTER 7

RELATIONSHIPS: THE HEART OF LEADERSHIP

The most important moments of impact involve one human being connecting with another human being. The relationship could be emotionally charged, direct, or indirect. Either way, what you’ve thought through and done before sets up the moment of impact and what happens afterwards.

Setting up, managing, and following through from those moments of impact well requires a tremendous amount of thinking and work. Thus this is our longest chapter. It could be overwhelming. So we’ve broken it into sections:

Communication Frameworks (Tools 7.1 to 7.4),

How to Hire Great People (Tools 7.5 to 7.13),

Bringing New Hires into the Team (Tools 7.14 to 7.17), and

Managing People Who Are Doing Well—and Not So Well (Tools 7.18 to 7.25).

The last three all fit inside ADEPT people management (Acquire, Develop, Encourage, Plan, Transition).

In many ways, this is the heart of inspiring and enabling others.

COMMUNICATION FRAMEWORKS

Let’s begin by putting in place some frameworks.

Engagement: Compliant–Contributing–Committed

Crossing the secret of happiness (good for others, good for me, good at it, as outlined in Chapter 5) and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs produces a way to look at different levels of engagement—disengaged, compliant, contributing, committed.

Disengaged—Those disengaged or engaged with the wrong things hurt the organization. They don’t meet the minimum standards and distract others.

Compliant—At the first level of engagement, compliant ...