How to build trust and credibility as a new leader (Part 2)

This is the second part of this guide. To read Part 1, click here.

Imagine you’re asked to lead a team whose members do a job you’ve never done before.

And not only do you have no idea how to do the job your team members need to do, but four out of five of them are new grads hired fresh out of college with little or no experience in their roles.

How do you build trust and credibility as a new leader when your competence in the day-to-day of your team’s work is zero, nil, nada? And more importantly, how do you help your team to succeed?

I found myself in exactly such a situation when I was asked to lead a candidate sourcing team at a tech recruitment firm in Tokyo without ever having done any sourcing or recruitment myself.

Six months later, the team’s KPIs were more than 40% up, three of my team members had been promoted, and I had a phenomenally talented successor in place to take over the team as I prepared to move into my next role.

In fact, if anything, my lack of subject matter competence made my life as a new leader easier. Not being able to fall back on any technical skills to advise my team members, I had to rely 100% on my leadership competencies to motivate them and set up mechanisms that ensured success.

This post describes some of those mechanisms and why they worked.

Step 4: Clarify direction

4.1 Align on a detailed and attractive definition of what success looks like

Few teams and companies suffer from a lack of ambitious goals.

“Become no. X in the market.”

“Grow revenue by Y%.”

“Increase our NPS to Z.”

Or all of the above.

There is nothing inherently wrong with such objectives. But if you think most of your team will care one iota about them, you might be in for a rude awakening.

Not because they aren’t committed. Rather, because such goals may not be personally meaningful to them; and are too distal to motivate them to take specific actions today.

We know from process theories of motivation, such as Vroom’s expectancy theory and Locke and Latham’s goal-setting theory, that people are motivated to pursue goals that lead them to something they value; and proximal goals lead to better performance outcomes than distal goals when it comes to working on complex tasks (which is pretty much all of knowledge work today) and in uncertain conditions (which has become the norm in our VUCA world).

If you come in as a new leader and set an ambitious, distal goal for your team such as “increase revenue / leads / NPS / etc. by [insert high number],” it’s possible that some people on your team—those with a strong achievement orientation and a competitive drive—will be motivated because achieving an ambitious objective is intrinsically motivating for them in itself.

But you’re equally likely to elicit yawns, anxiety, or puzzled head-scratching from others on your team whose achievement orientation manifests in other ways.

To clarify direction in a way that’s motivating for your team, you need to set goals in a more attractive way by connecting them to what people value. In short, clarify the connection between your team’s goals and outcomes your team members are likely to find personally meaningful.

If you’re lucky, you might have access to a tool like Attuned and know exactly what your team members value. But even if you don’t, you can’t go too wrong by spelling out the connection between your team’s goals and values that most people find at least somewhat meaningful, such as:

Professional learning and development opportunities.
Career growth opportunities.
Feedback and recognition.
Opportunities to help others.
Building meaningful relationships with others.

Aligning on a detailed and attractive definition of what success looks like requires spending time to understand what your team members and your other stakeholders value and to spell out explicitly, often, and in vivid detail how achieving your team’s goals will lead them to those valued outcomes.

4.2 Be laser-focused on no more than 2-3 objectiveS

In clarifying direction, being laser-focused on no more than 2-3 objectives is another important consideration.

I’ve once seen a company set 18 strategic goals for the upcoming year. I doubt anyone—including the CEO—could remember all of them.

Of course, every company will have a multitude of projects and initiatives going on at any given time, perhaps a lot more than 18. But it’s part of your intellectual responsibility as a leader to prioritize the most important ones and to distill these important goals to no more than 2-3 overarching and interconnected objectives that people will find specific, logical, meaningful, and memorable enough to guide their actions in the day-to-day.

If that sounds easy, you might be doing it the wrong way.

And there are many ways to go wrong when you’re trying to focus and simplify. I’ve seen leaders set goals that were so vague that no one understood what they meant. That usually happens when you know you’re not supposed to set more than 2-3 goals, but you want those 2-3 to include a dozen other things that you aren’t brave enough to say no to.

I’ve also seen leaders set goals that were so disconnected from each other that no one was quite sure what to prioritize when they inevitably ended up in conflict with each other for the team’s time and resources. That usually happens when people have different priorities, and they don’t spend enough time aligning on what the most important ones are, so in an effort to satisfy everyone, they create the appearance of focus without the real thing.

So if you want to build trust and credibility as a leader by clarifying direction for your team, ask yourself and your team:

What’s the most important thing we need to achieve as a team this year?
To achieve that, what’s the most important thing we need to achieve this quarter?
And what’s the most important thing we need to achieve this week to get there?

4.3 Clearly outline and monitor the milestones and steps that lead to your objectives

Because neither I, nor most of my team members, had the faintest idea how to do candidate sourcing when we got started, aligning on the most important priorities and on what achieving them would mean for team members would have done precious little to make sure we achieved those objectives.

We needed one more crucial ingredient: we needed to know exactly what steps would lead us to achieving our goals.

Because I’d never done the job myself, I didn’t have the luxury of being able to tell my team what to do. But I could do two things: I could study the work of those who knew how to do the job to understand what drove their success; and I could enlist the most experienced member of my team and my peers who had hands-on experience to help the new starters on the team.

This experience was extremely valuable for me in my growth as a manager. It taught me that my job wasn’t to tell people what to do to succeed. It was to facilitate mechanisms and relationships through which they could acquire that knowledge.

If you’re a former or recovering micromanager like I am, you might want to read that line again. Failing to grasp that distinction is one of the reasons why many first-time managers struggle after being promoted into leadership on the basis of their success as an individual contributor.

When that happens, the natural thing for most new leaders to do is to rely on their subject matter competence in helping their team to succeed.

But in pretty much any role, there are many different ways to perform well, and when you try too hard to enforce your own ways in a well-meaning effort to help your team members succeed, you often inadvertently end up stifling their ability to build on their own strengths and values to develop their own way of doing things.

At the same time, it’s easy to neglect the importance of developing your leadership competence to look at your team’s performance in a more systemic way, making sure the right goals, incentives, systems, processes, resources, and relationships are being put in place and flexibly adjusted as much as possible to the situation and each team member’s needs.

Step 5: Design for early wins

Clarifying direction is hard because we’re all swamped all the time.

And heuristics like the Eisenhower matrix aren’t always as helpful as they seem because at any one point in time, there are at least a dozen things that are important, and half a dozen that are also all urgent at the same time.

Today’s leaders need tools that help them pick just one or two priorities out of all those urgent and important things and organize all those other urgent and important tasks around them.

There are two tools that I’ve found particularly helpful over the years:

The value-complexity matrix.
Identifying leverage points.

5.1 The value-complexity matrix

At first sight, the value-complexity matrix is somewhat similar to the Eisenhower matrix:

However, there are two subtle but important differences that merit attention.

First, by replacing urgency with complexity, the matrix can help shift your focus from what it is that others want you to do to what it is that you can do quickly, restoring a sense of agency and an internal locus of control over your and your team’s priorities.

More often than not, people will want you to do too many things at once, and creating lists of all these things will only make you want to run and tuck away somewhere warm with a bucket of ice cream and your phone switched off.

In reality, though, people rarely need you to make fast progress on every front. They just need to feel assured that progress is being made.

Identifying the areas where you and your team can succeed with the least effort will help you make progress quickly, creating a sense of confidence that will give you both the momentum and the room for maneuver you need to tackle more complex challenges.

And almost always, you’ll be able to identify outcomes that are not just relatively easy to achieve but also provide high value to important stakeholders, including your team members, your own boss, your peers, and your customers.

As a new leader, your best chance to demonstrate competence is to start with these high-value, low-complexity quick wins in the top left-hand corner of the matrix.

The second, perhaps more subtle way in which the value-complexity matrix is different from the Eisenhower matrix is that by replacing importance with value, it can help augment your thinking and discussions by shifting the focus from what’s important (always too many things) to what value these important projects will deliver exactly, how, and to whom.

That way, when every goal seems important, the matrix can encourage you and your team to assess the value of each more critically, taking a crucial step towards outlining a detailed and attractive vision of what success will look like from your and your different stakeholders’ perspectives.

More often than not, as you start examining your objectives more closely, at least a few things that seemed super critical will start to seem much less important, a clearer, leaner set of priorities will emerge, and your team will be more aligned on why these are important.

When clarifying direction as a new leader, your top priority for the next 6-12 months will almost always come from the high value-high complexity quadrant of the matrix.

But because you don’t want to wait 6-12 months to build confidence, trust, and credibility, you’ll want to start by getting a few quick wins accomplished from the high-value, low complexity quadrant of the matrix.

A pro tip is to make sure that your longer-term, 6-12-month goal and your quick wins are connected.

In other words, your quick wins shouldn’t be apart from or tangential to your main goal, but an integral part of it as your first steps towards accomplishing that goal.

5.2 Identifying leverage points

Every organization, every team, and every person is a complex system with too many moving parts and variables to influence—let alone control—all or even the majority of them. That’s why micromanagers—or “nanomanagers,” to use a term recently “popularized” by Elon Musk—are more often than not a liability.

In an effort to control every small aspect of the system—the hours their employees work, the location where they do the work, or even their code, which Twitter’s engineers were required to print (!) and then shred a few hours later—they not only risk losing sight of the big picture but also of the most important leverage points where their intervention would actually be useful and necessary.

Donella Meadows, the famous American environmentalist and systems thinker, defined leverage points as “places within a complex system […] where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.”

She identified 12 leverage points that could serve as useful places to intervene in any complex system, and ranked these in order of their effectiveness. For example, parameters that are fairly constant—such as how many hours people work a week—rarely provide substantial leverage.

Sure, you can work 50 instead of 40 hours a week, or even 70 instead of 50, but at best this is going to produce only marginal returns. Chances are you’ll soon be too tired for those extra hours to be productive, you’ll become increasingly irritable, jeopardizing your team’s mood, motivation, and engagement, and you’ll start making rash decisions as your perspective progressively becomes narrower from sheer exhaustion.

By contrast, feedback loops—and especially positive feedback loops—are a point of fairly high leverage. They have the potential to slow down or speed up processes, creating a self-reinforcing flywheel effect across your team and possibly beyond. That’s why it’s crucial for leaders to learn to give impactful feedback—and especially positive feedback—on a regular basis, preferably weekly.

Goals, incentives, and the structure of information flow are even more effective leverage points, but they’re all trumped by one that’s even more important: mindset.

You can’t simply tell someone—yourself included—to be more positive, or less anxious about something, or not feel angry when someone upsets you. You can only change someone’s mindset by creating experiences that will rewire their default reaction.

Step 6: Create a robust team OS

It wasn’t always the case, but now I can tell if a team is functioning well or not after a 10-minute discussion with its leader or one of its team members. If there are significant gaps in more than a couple of the 10 areas below, it’s highly likely that the team’s performance and morale could be significantly improved.

These are the 10 areas that I, too, focus on in the first 3-6 months when taking over a new team.

And when all of these processes are in place, I focus on making them better and better.

Here they are:

The first, possibly counterintuitive thing to note about this list is that as a manager, you are accountable for making sure that all of these processes are in place and functioning smoothly on your team. Naturally, that doesn’t mean you are responsible for putting all of these processes in place.

If you’re lucky enough to have a strong HR team supporting you, they’ll mostly take care of introducing and fine-tuning the “HR-side” processes in the list above as part of their accountability for these at the company level. But if any of these HR processes are not in place or not functioning as well as they could, it’s in your best interest as a manager to proactively partner with HR to implement or improve them as soon as possible.

6.1 Signs that you have a robust team OS → Team-side processes

6.1.1 Goals & incentives

You and everyone on your team knows what your most important goal is for this year.

You have no more than three strategic goals for the year, and everyone on your team knows what they are.
You have clearly identified 3-5 quick wins that you can achieve in weeks rather than months to take the first steps towards achieving your strategic goals.
Your strategic goals are broken down to no more than three goals for the current quarter, so that both you and your team members know what you need to achieve this quarter to achieve your goal(s) by year-end.
Every week, you discuss what you need to focus on to achieve your quarterly goals.
You can clearly link your team’s goals to specific outcomes and incentives your team members value, such as learning and career growth opportunities, positive feedback and recognition, making a difference in other people’s lives, solving a problem they personally care about, etc.

6.1.2 Roles & decision-making

Your team members know exactly what they’re accountable for.

Team members have a say in what their responsibilities are, and their tasks are aligned with their strengths.
Accountability goes hand-in-hand with decision-making rights and the requisite resources. If someone is accountable for something, their decisions aren’t second-guessed.
Team members clearly understand how decisions are made on the team, what they can decide on their own, when they need to ask for approval, who they need to consult with before decisions, and who they need to inform about them.
Team members and relevant stakeholders are consulted before important decisions are made.

6.1.3 Meetings

Meetings don’t take up more than 40% of team members’ working hours.

There are at least two longer, meeting-free periods (days or half-days) in team members’ calendars to allow them to do focused work without distractions.
Every team member has a dedicated 1-on-1 with their manager, ideally weekly, but at least biweekly.
There are weekly team meetings to discuss tactical issues, progress, and bottlenecks.
There are regular retrospectives that help the team to learn from experience, double down on what’s working well, and identify improvement opportunities.
The team’s interfaces with other teams are actively managed, e.g. the manager has regular meetings with the leaders of adjacent teams in their department and other relevant teams across departments.
Meetings start and end on time, have a clear agenda, a designated facilitator, and a note-taker if needed.
For each agenda item, it’s clear what the meeting’s purpose is—e.g., to share or ask for information, to make a decision, to decide on a next step, etc.
Team members feel safe to voice dissenting views in meetings, and the facilitator encourages everyone to contribute.
Meetings end with clear follow-up actions assigned to specific persons with deadlines, which are then monitored.

6.1.4 Monitoring & feedback

There are monitoring mechanisms in place that make progress towards the team’s annual and quarterly goals transparent. These are discussed with the team at least once a week.

Team members are always clear on whether they’re meeting expectations.
Positive feedback is given as often as possible, ideally at least once a week to each team member.
An effort is made to make positive feedback impactful by making sure feedback is specific, reinforcing important strengths and values, connected to team goals, personalized, and coming from multiple sources.
There is no nitpicking when small mistakes are made, but serious issues around underperformance or unacceptable behavior are addressed promptly.
Any mistakes or failures are treated as learning opportunities, and team members receive meaningful support to improve.
Upward feedback is encouraged; team members have a safe channel to voice constructive criticism of their manager.
Team members feel safe giving each other constructive peer feedback; they address any issues with each other directly, rather than constantly escalating.

Team members have received training in an assertive communication framework such as non-violent communication and are able to use these skills in their day-to-day.

6.1.5 Training

Team members have dedicated personal development budgets or are able to access relevant books, masterclasses, courses, and conferences through other means.

There are regular internal and external training opportunities for team members.
Team members are regularly exposed to information about key trends in the market, customer environment, and competitive environment.
Team members have opportunities to share their knowledge both within and outside the team.
Team members have access to coaching, mentoring, and ideally mental health professionals to get personalized support with their professional and personal development.

6.2 Signs that you have a robust team OS → HR-side processes

6.2.1 Hiring

Your employer brand and value proposition are clearly articulated, attractive to prospective candidates, and convincingly communicated across all relevant channels. In other words, it’s clear to candidates why they should join your team instead of other options in the market.

Salaries are fair across the team, in line with the level of talent you’re looking for, and adjusted at least once a year based on market trends. In other words, you’re not paying some people substantially more or less than others for the same job and experience level, you’re not trying to hire the top 10% of talent in the market for average salaries, and you don’t wait around for team members to tell you that inflation has been pretty high this year.
You partner with your HR team to make sure that all available active sourcing channels are used effectively, referrals are incentivized, and relationships with recruitment agencies are proactively managed so they send you the best talent before they send them to your competitors.
Job descriptions are realistic and attractive, highlight your employer brand and value proposition in addition to your expectations, and are worded in a way to encourage women and candidates in minority groups to apply, for example, by explicitly encouraging candidates to apply even if they don’t meet all of the criteria.
There is a competency-based structured interview process in place with no more than four interviews in the process, and it’s clear to every interviewer what competencies you’re hiring for, what situational and behavioral interview questions they can use to measure these competencies, and what constitutes an excellent/acceptable/insufficient answer to these questions.
Everyone in the hiring process receives thorough training on doing structured interviews, so they’re able to evaluate interviewees in a consistent manner, make candidates feel comfortable in the process, and make sure candidates have ample time to ask their own questions in interviews.
Interviewers coordinate with each other and share interview notes, so candidates aren’t asked the same questions over and over again.
Consistent efforts are made to provide a great candidate experience across all touchpoints, and their effectiveness is monitored, and if necessary, improved.

6.2.2 Onboarding

New starters’ employment contract, computers, phones, desks, chairs, key cards, badges, business cards, etc. (as applicable) are ready and waiting for them on their first day.

New starters’ access to all relevant systems, including email accounts and groups, calendars, instant messaging, and other software tools is set up and properly configured by their first day.
New starters have been invited to all relevant team and company meetings.
New starters receive an onboarding checklist that makes the various steps in their onboarding process and their own responsibilities in this period transparent to them.
It’s clear to new starters what expectations they need to meet in their onboarding period to pass probation.
New starters receive comprehensive training about administrative processes such as requesting holidays, tracking expenses, etc.
New starters receive comprehensive information about the company’s history, organization, strategy, product(s), customers, and competitors.
New starters receive adequate training in job-relevant skills.
Close attention is paid to the social onboarding of new starters, with opportunities for them to get to know people outside their teams.
The manager checks in at least once a week with new starters, and provides opportunities for more frequent check-ins if the new starters need it.

6.2.3 Career planning

There are competency-based job categories, salary grades, and career paths for every role on the team so team members can step up in their careers every 1-2 years if they meet the criteria for the next level.

The competencies for each role include both technical and people skills, and are used as a basis for performance management and professional learning and development activities.
Training, coaching, and mentoring opportunities are available to team members who aspire to leadership roles.
There is an expert career track available to senior team members who don’t aspire to leadership roles.
Team members are given opportunities for lateral career moves within the organization as much as applicable.
Career conversations take place at least once or twice a year with each team member as part of the performance management process or in the form of stay interviews.

6.2.4 Performance management

Performance review conversations take place at least twice a year, with team members receiving continuous and timely feedback in between.

Performance reviews are based on clear and transparent competency-based criteria.
Performance reviews incorporate team members’ own assessment of their performance and peer feedback in addition to the manager’s evaluation.
Peer feedback is sought both from within and outside the team to include all relevant stakeholders.
Performance reviews don’t take team members by surprise; they’re given sufficient continuous feedback to be fully aware if they’re exceeding, meeting, or failing to meet expectations.
Team members have at least some level of control over the review process, for example, they can request feedback on specific competencies from specific people if they wish.
There is a clear and transparent performance improvement process in place to support team members who don’t meet expectations.
Team members are also given the opportunity to give feedback on their manager as part of their performance review.

6.2.5 Measuring engagement

Employee engagement is measured at least quarterly using a scientifically valid, statistically reliable survey instrument.

Engagement survey results and plans for follow-up actions are promptly communicated to team members.
Team members are given regular progress updates on follow-up actions, and the effectiveness of these actions is measured in subsequent surveys.
Managers have regular access to training, coaching, mentoring, and ideally mental health professionals, helping them to continuously develop their leadership skills and deal with the physical and emotional stresses of leadership.

This article has been edited down from its original length. To read the full version, visit The MotivatingManager Monthly on Substack.

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