Welcome back to the Look and Sound of Leadership, an ongoing series of executive

coaching tips designed to help you be perceived in the workplace the way you want

to be perceived. I'm Tom Henschel, your executive coach, and today we're talking

about leading teams. Artero had been leading 40 risk management professionals for about a year when he asked if I would meet with him privately.

I'd been coaching one of his direct reports for five months and I assumed we were going to discuss the coaching.

I was wrong. I've been saying I want our group

to be world-class since the day I got here, he told me, but my direct reports are all over the

map. And a lot of the people are still doing

what they were doing when Melanie was leading the group he said referring to

his predecessor I feel like I can't get this group moving in the same direction.

I asked what direction he wanted the group to go.

He responded with words like, excellence, integrity, and good judgment.

If I were one of your direct reports, how would I know if I was acting with excellence,

integrity or good judgment? I asked him.

What would those things look like and how would you

measure them as we talked our Torah began to see that his ideas and concepts which were

perfectly clear to him most likely were just vague truisms to his direct reports

and the team at large.

Arturo was a smart enough leader to recognize that his frustrations with his team may have been misdirected. The likely source of confusion

was him, not them.

Okay, he said energetically, so I need to define the behaviors I want to see, okay, and I need to decide how to measure them, right?

Well, I do think that's important, but I'd actually advise you to begin at a different place. What teams need most is a clear

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