Removing Excuses
A key aspect of leadership, perhaps one of the most important, is to clear any barriers or impediments to success for your team. I sometimes jokingly refer to it as “removing excuses”. I’m not suggesting that your team is looking for excuses not to accomplish their tasks and/or goals. But I wouldn’t be surprised that you’ve heard them list a number of reasons they fell short of their original plan. Some were likely legitimate and others were barriers you might have liked for them to push past.
It begins with telling your teacher “my dog ate my homework” or the one I heard from my son after he took the ACT test a second time and came back with a lower score than the first time, he said “My battery died in my calculator during the test”. It carries forward into the professional life with “My computer died”, “We ‘thought’ the back-ups were working”, “I didn’t think we had it in the budget”, and “I just didn’t have the time”.
Your role as a leader is to maintain open lines of communication with your team, ask them probing questions, make sure you understand if there are any technology, financial, hardware, software, or personnel barriers that will impede their success, and then remove them. It’s likely far more important that they are productive than you are.
If their laptop is outdated and inhibiting productivity, then upgrade it or replace it. If their keyboard is broken hand them yours until an adequate replacement can be found. If you believe they need a $40 book from Amazon to get them to the next level, then order it for them. You get the idea. Certainly you can’t solve every issue as they would expect. That’s where creativity comes in. Perhaps you cannot afford the specific thing they believe they need but you can help to find an adequate compromise.
Regardless, be aware of their inhibitors and then make every effort to clear the path for them to be productive.
