Crossposted from my blog.

I’m going to first describe a leader’s responsibility to their team because I don’t think it’s possible to develop good principles for working and communicating effectively with individuals without understanding the broader environment that the leader-individual relationship exists within.

Leaders have the following responsibilities towards their teams:

Identify your team's purpose — leaders must know their team's role in the success of the broader organization. A clear purpose helps the team adopt habits and actions essential for success, growth, and survival.
Identify the resources available to the team — this essentially is just the skills, talents, and attitudes of the individuals on the team, but it also includes material resources like tools, software, etc. The key recognition here is that individuals are, for lack of better words, dynamic resources - they perform at an extremely variable level depending on the context that they’re placed within. This means that leaders must not only learn individual talents but also the contexts in which those talents manifest most fully for everyone on the team.
Figure out how your team can best leverage the resources available to fulfill its purpose — this involves building a set of structures for the team that gives the team its best chance to fulfill its purpose properly given its resources.

The biggest challenge is that all of these are so dynamic. Unless you’re in a large and bureaucratic organization, things change all the time - reorganizations happen, people can join or leave, priorities shift, and so, so much more. It’s a constant challenge for leaders to stay on top of these changes and adapt the structures that their teams operate within.

The leader-individual relationship is extremely tough to manage within this context, especially given that the leader’s responsibility to the team and the organization as a whole must come ahead of their responsibility to each individual on their team^[1]. Despite this challenge, there is a set of principles leaders can adopt to not only help individuals navigate the changes and continue contributing effectively but also bring the best out of individuals and help them grow:

Make them feel seen
Help them understand what is happening
Provide meaning to their work

make them feel seen

There are two critical questions that every effective leader must help individu...

Leadership