There are three essential rules to build an engaged, highly motivated, [generative organization](2021-09-21%20Lean,%20generative%20cultures%20and%20how%20to%20find%20them.md) you will feel proud of leading. On the other hand, if you feel team engagement is low or you can't build a high performance *team* ([as opposed to work groups](https://www.leadershipgeeks.com/difference-between-work-groups-and-teams/)), it is *always* the fault of the manager or leader. Full stop. There is no excuse and faulting your colleagues for the lack of engagement or not working as a *team* is the cheapest excuse of all. The three simple and clear - yet behaviorally very challenging - rules are: 1. **Ask the right questions**: As manager of a team your job is to [ask the right questions](Asking%20Better%20Questions.md). *It is not your job to propose solutions.* Rather, you should help your team find those solutions *on their own*. 3. **Coach and delegate decisions**: You must learn how to [let your workers lead](Let%20your%20workers%20lead.md) and [coach teams](Coaching%20Elements.md) towards autonomy by delegating decisions. It *never* is your job to tell people what to do next or make their decisions for them. Optimize your organization with an [Agile Strategy](Agile%20Strategy.md). No matter how smart you are, eventually you will reach a limit where the wisdom of the crowds a.k.a. [collective intelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_intelligence) will outsmart you and would have given your organization the high-velocity edge it needs. 5. **Kindle productive conflict and foster participation**: *Don’t hold monologues* - rather, kindle discussions and foster participation by having [agile conversations](Agile%20Conversations.md), [asking better questions](Asking%20Better%20Questions.md), asking for *specific* feedback (as opposed to a generic "what do you think?" or "does this make sense?", which probably isn't even a genuine\* question), kindling productive conflict (with challenging yet genuine\* questions), and letting silence be part of a meeting by shutting up and waiting. If you need to speak for more than a few minutes in a row, you are probably suffocating engagement and obstructing performance. Obviously, if your team is more junior, you will have to find the right balance between directing versus coaching or delegating that the team needs. And you need to identify the maximum challenge you can expect them to resolve autonomously. This is known as [Situational Leadership](https://johnkwhitehead.ca/situational-leadership/). In other words, you are a bad manager/leader if *any one point* of the following is true: - **You feel the need to describe or define the solutions your team is implementing.** You *should* be working on the [(agile) strategy](Agile%20Strategy.md) and [improving](Improvement%20Kata.md) the [(lean) operations](5%20Lean%20Capabilities.md) of your team. - **You feel the need to make more than a few key decisions** you are uniquely best placed to make ***with* the team**. (Even worse: **You are making decisions without consulting your team.**) You *should* be maximizing decision making delegation. Realize that making decisions requires strong [psychological safety](Management/Teams/Psychological%20Safety.md) in your team. - **You feel the need to talk for more than a few minutes in a row.** Talking more will not make your team hear or understand you better - while taking less (but not too little) might. Talking more will, however, *kill* discussions and *engagement* straight away. You *should* ask genuine\* questions. Refer to my [Meeting Facilitator Playbook](Meeting%20Facilitator%20Playbook.md) for tips on how to improve your meetings. If any of the above is the case for you, my earlier blog post on [lean, generative cultures and how to find them](2021-09-21%20Lean,%20generative%20cultures%20and%20how%20to%20find%20them.md) might help you identify correlated issues that your organization as a whole will most likely be having. \* A **genuine question** is one where you are curious about the answer and will take it serious even if the answer is not at all what you expected. If your questions aren't genuine, you are once again suffocating engagement.