You won't lead your team very far unless everyone knows where you're going. That's why establishing a clear mission is critical. For Kerry Shampine, who led one of the first formal teams at Northwest Natural Gas, writing a charter was a way to put everyone at ease with a new way of working together. A Mentor Effective leaders manage up as well as down. But they learn horizontally, by gathering advice from peers about the professional and emotional challenges of running a team.
Mentors come in many varieties and from many different sources.
Boeing's Moravec had hundreds of potential mentors to choose from inside his team-obsessed company. But Kerry Shampine, the team pioneer at Northwest Natural Gas, had to search outside his company. Recently, a request for advice on creating team schedules generated eight dense pages of suggestions, all with phone numbers or email addresses for further advice. You may not copy, republish, redistribute or exploit in any manner any material from these pages without the express written consent of Fast Company. You may, however, download copyrighted material for your individual and non-commercial use only.