Team Leads and Managers Must Be Participatory
The Lean management philosophy advocates for a practice called “Gemba walking”, in which managers visit the place where the work is done, to observe and to talk to the people doing the work. That is what management scientists call participative leadership: staying personally involved in the activities of the teams.
That does not mean that you are meddling or micromanaging: it means that you are staying aware of what is happening. One can be present and have discussions, but still leave people with agency about what they do and how they do it. Good leaders know when they need to intervene and make a decision, and when to leave it to the people doing the work—which should be most of the time.
Reading status reports will not tell you what is going on: cause-and-effect is usually removed from status reports, filtered out in the course of rolling up status. The real issues get deleted, as too much detail, and so you don’t really know what is happening. Details matter when there are recurring issues that you are trying to understand: those details provide hints about the root cause.
You cannot know what is happening for real unless you are in the midst of it.
A participative leader visits the work setting frequently, asking questions, facilitating discussions, and sometimes making decisions—but not bossing people around, telling them how two do their work, or dominating discussions. A participative leader is open-minded and helps the best idea to win, no matter who it comes from. And an effective participative leaders leaves people feeling like they are in charge of their work.
Participative leaders observe the work firsthand, and therefore in a position to know who is really doing what. They are immune to people who do things to get attention, because they observe who is actually producing and voicing ideas. They pay attention to discussion threads, and they look at work artifacts—not to criticize, but to discover where help is needed and where more learning is needed.
A participative leader is an adaptive leader and forms a relationship with each individual. Learn their challenges and their career goals. Mentor them. Develop a unique way of leading them that reflects their unique nature and their abilities, which might be greater than yours. Have empathy for them.