Here are six common recommendations I make in my coaching to Department leads taking on or taking over new disciplines or new teams and the ways of working.
- Skip Meetings – Set up skip meetings. Skip meetings can seem daunting to both you and a team member with the team however it is a great way to connect, and understand how the team operates and how your managers are doing. Importantly, I always recommend requesting a rundown of recent reports and examples of campaigns and running through the why, the what, the how and the thing the member of the team is most proud of. Either an achievement or a failure they can learn from.
- Shadow Mornings – Set up shadow mornings – where you shadow and get hands-on together within a discipline or new channel. This enables you to understand the work and the discipline, you will understand your people’s thought process and working style and they’ll respect your wanting to learn.
- Reverse Mentorship – introduce reverse mentors within your Department and across the business, reverse mentorship works great as both parties learn a tonne and connect when the modern work life is not set up to enable this. I often recommend you seek a reverse mentor outside of your Department or team as it will open your eyes to other challenges and enables you to positively influence others on your Department.
I recommend this to CEOs, founders and c-suite execs in my broader coaching and have brilliant feedback. - DIY – Set up a personal goal to run a short campaign & report back to the team after some training. I recommend this with internal versions of TikToks, paid media campaigns, new app ad copy etc. Ask for help when you’re stuck, it adds trust and builds authentic leadership
- Lunch And Learns – lunch and learns are great opportunities to share knowledge and insights while the company can buy lunches for teams. Often lunches and learns fail as it is lunchtime, take inspiration from setting a time that is just after lunch and enables people to understand you are not taking time from your teams.
- Champions and Captains – Embrace having more leadership within your teams and Department, have channel champions who can champion a channel and internally coach others on it. I recommend setting up a formal Champions model and selecting rotating Friday mornings for champions to coach their colleagues. Hint, open this up to broader teams to join, you will be surprised how many adjacent teams want to know more and potentially join Marketing, Growth or Product teams. Captains are rotating leaders who lead agendas, and meetings and drive achievements moving forward. This is a concept that many squads like to employ and harbours collaboration, trust and respect throughout the business.
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