Coaching practices for Stop Doing Your Teams Work

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Stop Doing Your Teams Work, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • My team is buried under recurring meetings and reports that everyone privately thinks are pointless, but no single person can just kill them
  • Everyone on my team is quietly playing for their own scoreboard
  • I hand work off and somehow it keeps boomeranging back onto my plate
  • My team keeps dropping the ball at the same stage every single project
  • My team is genuinely running well without me now, but I keep inserting myself into decisions they could make

Practices that may help

  1. Run a regular team elimination review
    Periodically review what the team is doing that no longer serves any current goal.
    The Eisenhower Matrix for Teams
  2. Align around collective results, not individual status
    Teams fail when members prioritize their own visibility or department’s success over the shared goal.
    The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Made Practical
  3. Resist reverse delegation (the "monkey back" problem)
    When a report brings you their monkey, don’t take it — send it back with the next step owned.
    Delegation Levels, Made Practical
  4. Map your team’s genius coverage
    Check whether all six activities are covered by someone who finds them energizing.
    The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni)
  5. Performing: step back and protect the conditions
    A Performing team needs air cover and resources, not direction.
    Tuckman’s Stages of Team Development
  6. Resist upward (reverse) delegation
    Don’t let the task you delegated jump back onto your desk the first time it gets hard.
    Effective Delegation, Made Practical
  7. Take extreme ownership
    When the team fails, the leader looks first at what the leader did or failed to do.
    Extreme Ownership, Made Practical
  8. Use Start-Stop-Keep reviews to drive continuous improvement
    Regularly ask what the team should start, stop, and keep doing — and act on the answers.
    The Rockefeller Habits: Scaling Up with Rhythm and Focus
  9. Cover and move (teamwork over silos)
    Every team and department exists to support the others toward the same mission, not to win locally.
    Extreme Ownership, Made Practical
  10. Create a culture of peer-to-peer accountability
    Teams that only hold each other accountable through the manager haven’t built real accountability at all.
    The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Made Practical

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