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. No comments have been posted yet.