Passive Team Management – Why Your Team Is Struggling to Reach Targets
Passive team management is as damaging to team performance as micromanagement and being overly prescriptive to team members. Passive management often shows up in a lack of direction, a lack of engagement, hesitation, delayed decision making and more. While passive team management may feel like a hands off approach that empowers teams, it often leaves teams confused, unsupported and disengaged.
I have been lucky to work in many top companies, alongside many talented managers and leaders. In my experience, far too many managers are too passive in their management approach.
Passive Team Management – Why Your Team Is Struggling to Reach Targets
- 10 signs your management style is too passive
- 8 Big Dangers Of Passive team management
- 5 actions for better more active management of any team
It can be really easy to focus on your own work and not spend enough time managing the team. Passive team managers do just this. It is even harder to manage actively and successfully when you have not been taught the best approaches to take in the many difference situations managers encounter.
A study published in the British Journal of Management estimates that at least 20% of employees experience passive leadership in the workplace. In my experience, more than half of managers are passive team managers or at least MORE passive than they should be. A passive management style is detrimental to team performance. I have personally worked for several managers that just left me to get on with my work. In this instance, I had next no input, minimal direction and no development from them. I had a manager in name only and this DID NOT help me do a better job at all.
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Passive Management In All Levels
I have worked alongside plenty of board directors that have passive leadership approach to their team management and they struggle to increase team performance in any meaningful way – i.e. passive team management can be found in new managers all the way through the top management ranks.
I also had too much of a passive management style UNTIL I was taught and shown what really good active team management looked like. 13 promotions up to board level and multiple Best Team prizes suggests I got a lot right in managing teams.
The most important outcome of having a leader of a team is better team performance. If a group of individuals can produce the same or better results without a manager, there is no point in having that manager. Active team management, done in the right way, significantly increases team performance.
10 signs your management style is too passive
Here are 10 signs of being too passive or of passive team management. A great way to check is to run an anonymous survey of your team asking them to rate on a scale some or all of these factors. Passive team managers:
- Slow decision makers or even avoid making difficult decisions
- The team asks the manager to make a lot of decisions they should be making themselves
- Team members don’t have clear priorities or goals on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis.
- Little or no action is taken to address underperformance, which typically gets worse over time, causing even more problems
- Deadlines are regularly missed with no consequences for the individuals
- High performers feel unsupported and just left to get on with their work which does little to engage and keep them
- Dominate personalities hold a lot of sway in the team as passive managers do little to balance out different personalities
- Conflicts within the team and between teams go unresolved slowing down work and damaging relationships
- Team members feel uncertain – of direction, of authority, of responsibilities… which again slows down work.
- Passive team managers are much more reactive than proactive, often putting out one fire after another
If a few of these feel a bit too close to home, then adopting a more active management style would help you be a more effective manager and help increase overall team performance.
8 Big Dangers Of Passive team management
Passive managers often lead teams that struggle to meaningfully increase team performance. Whereas teams led by active managers find realistic targets much easier to beat. With passive team management working in the team can feel very unfocused, directionless and reactive.
Passive team management causes a ton of little issues that add up over time to create significant damage to team performance. Here are 8 of the big ones.
- A passive management style lowers co-ordination and teamwork across the team
- Lack of clear prioritisation means too much low value works is undertaken
- With passive leadership, getting decisions takes longer. Team members often avoid taking decisions themselves because a lack of clarity and responsibilities
- Team standards drop lower over time with passive managers because they don’t put in the work and effort needed to maintain standards.
- There is a lot of ambiguity in the team and in the communication between team members
- Everyone works at a slower pace – decisions are slower, help is given more reluctantly or slowly, resources are less available etc. The team just produces less.
- Passive team managers generally have lower levels of trust within the team. Teamwork suffers. Coordination suffers. Support and help suffers.
- Unhealthy team dynamics often emerge with those shouting the loudest winning at the expense of others and the overall team.
Teams with passive managers are often quiet places, with everyone doing their own thing rather than working together with collaboration, communication and joint problem solving. The more reactive the team, the more the team struggles to reach sensible targets, the more likely the manager is too passive in their approach.
5 actions for better more active management of any team
Being a successful active manager takes skill, courage and confidence. It is not an easy journey to become a very successful manager. With so few managers being taught how to effectively manage teams, getting level of active team management to drive performance is even harder.
I am taking you through the most important actions you should take to develop a more active team management style without straying into micromanaging territory. I have used these actions to transform the worst team in a business into one of the best within 6-12 months. Each are very effective and when implemented well, will make a significant difference to the performance of any team.
1 – Clear Direction
Firstly, choose a very clear direction for your team. Active managers always communication clear direction a lot. It is always a good idea to work with your boss to agree a clear direction for the team. Before speaking to your boss, always form your own views of direction based on where your team is and what the company strategy and situation is.
When you have a clear team direction for at least the next 6 months, then break this down into clear goals for sub-teams and individuals on at least a monthly and quarterly basis. Keep communicating progress against those goals – a clear indicator of active team management.
2 – Constant Feedback
With clearer direction and clear goals for individuals, you have the foundations to provide a lot more FEEDBACK to your team members. You can talk about progress, about performance, about how they are working, what seems to be effective and what is not. Active team managers create visibility of progress against goals and spend time talking to their teams about progress. The more feedback team members get, the more clarity they will have on what they should be doing to contribute to beating team goals.
3 – Solve Problems
Find and solve team problems as quickly as practical. Don’t solve problems your team members should be solving themselves. Solve problems your team members can’t solve. Ones that involve other teams, that are more complex, which require authority and persuasion skills etc. Find problems team members struggle to solve and work to solve them. Active team managers spend a lot of their time solving the problems that enable their teams to work more effectively and efficiently.
4 – Step Into Conflict
Don’t allow mis-communication, personal rivalries, a lack of clarity on roles and responsibilities, poor behaviour, poor performance etc to continue without you taking visible action to resolve these problems. Visible action sends a clear message. Destructive conflict is not acceptable. Show you have an involved team management style by resolving conflicts quickly.
5 – Explain Decisions
Explain your decisions to the team. This makes them transparent and your team understand why you have made the decisions you have. This gives them confidence and makes you more accountable. Plus you are also helping them develop their decision making skills. Be confident in the decisions you make and admit to the team when you have made a bad call. The worst decision is no decision.
Please note, that none of these actions create micromanagement. All these actions are focused on the environment in which the team works, on what they work on and helps to improve communication. One example – you are not telling your team how to reach goals, only setting out which goals they need to reach.
These 5 actions to adopt a more active management style are a great starting point. When you are doing each of these actions WELL, you will see your team members working more closely together and your team will be finding it a lot easier to reach team targets. Then you can focus on the next set of actions to develop and increase the success of your team.
in summary
Managing teams well is not easy. If it were, everyone would be a manager. A passive team management style hinders your ability to increase team performance. Being a successful manager is finding the right balance between many conflicting priorities, pressures and needs to give your team the best chance of doing a great job. There is NOT a one size fits all. What is right with one team and in a specific company situation will not work nearly as well with a different team and in a different company situation.
Flexibility and adaptability are both very important skills to develop to be successful as an active team manager and leader.
As a reminder, the best actions to adopt a more active team management style are:
- Choose a very clear team direction and communicate this direction every chance you get
- Provide a lot of feedback to your team. The more visibility you create, the more you have to feedback on
- Find and solve problems your team members can’t, which positively helps your team outperform
- Step into conflict to reduce the level of destructive conflict in your team
- Explain your decisions to the team – be transparent and accountable to them
For coaching options to improve how well you manage teams and businesses and to improve the results your team generates, click here to learn more about our coaching programmes to help you improve team performance quickly
If you have any questions on “Passive Team Management – Why Your Team Is Struggling to Reach Targets”, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
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