Advice

How to Lead a Team Without Losing Your Mind (Or Your People)

Three months ago, I watched a perfectly good manager turn into a walking stress ball because she thought leadership meant doing everything herself. Sarah—let's call her Sarah because that's actually her name and she said I could use it—had just been promoted to team leader at this logistics company in Brisbane. Smart as a whip, worked harder than anyone, knew the systems inside out. Perfect candidate, right?

Wrong. Within six weeks, she was working 12-hour days, her team was avoiding her like she had the plague, and productivity had dropped 23%. Classic case of someone who confused being busy with being effective.

Here's the thing about leading teams that most leadership courses won't tell you: it's less about knowing all the answers and more about asking the right bloody questions. And for the love of all that's holy, it's definitely not about becoming everyone's best mate or turning into some corporate robot spouting management speak.

The Myth of the All-Knowing Leader

I've been training managers for seventeen years now, and I still meet people who think leadership means having all the answers. These are usually the same people who micromanage their teams into submission and then wonder why nobody takes initiative anymore.

Leadership isn't about being the smartest person in the room. If you're the smartest person in the room, you're either in the wrong room or you've hired poorly. Your job as a leader is to make your team collectively smarter than any individual, including yourself.

Take Mark from that manufacturing outfit in Perth I worked with last year. Brilliant engineer, could solve technical problems that had stumped entire departments. But as a team leader? Disaster. He'd swoop in every time someone hit a roadblock, solve their problem in five minutes, and walk away feeling like Superman. His team felt like children. They stopped thinking for themselves because Mark would just fix everything anyway.

Start With Why (And Not the Simon Sinek Way)

Everyone bangs on about Simon Sinek and "start with why," but that's not the why I'm talking about. I'm talking about why you're actually doing this leadership thing in the first place.

Are you here because you want the title and the extra money? Fine, be honest about it. Are you here because you genuinely want to develop people? Also fine. Are you here because someone told you it was the next logical step in your career? Less fine, but at least you know.

The worst leaders I've encountered are the ones who haven't figured out their own motivation. They flip-flop between being everyone's friend and being a dictator, usually within the same conversation. Your team can smell uncertainty from a mile away.

I remember this one manager—let's call him Dave because his name was actually Trevor but he looked like a Dave—who changed his management style based on whatever business book he'd read that week. One month it was "radical candour," the next it was "servant leadership." His team spent more time trying to work out which version of Dave they were dealing with than actually getting work done.

The Three Things That Actually Matter

After nearly two decades of watching people succeed and fail at this, I've narrowed effective team leadership down to three things that actually matter:

Clear expectations. Not aspirational nonsense about "exceeding customer expectations" or "driving innovation." I mean specific, measurable things that your team can actually control. If you can't explain what success looks like in concrete terms, you're setting everyone up to fail.

Consistent feedback. Not annual reviews or monthly one-on-ones that feel like root canal therapy. I'm talking about real-time, useful input that helps people improve. And here's the controversial bit: feedback doesn't have to be gentle. It has to be fair and specific, but it doesn't have to be wrapped in cotton wool.

Getting obstacles out of the way. This is where most managers stuff up completely. They think their job is to give people more work, when actually their job is to remove the barriers preventing people from doing good work. That might mean fighting with procurement to get better tools, or telling upper management to stop changing priorities every five minutes.

Everything else is just window dressing.

The Delegation Dilemma

Let's talk about delegation, because this is where good intentions go to die. Proper delegation isn't dumping tasks you don't want to do onto other people. It's not giving someone a job and then hovering over them like a helicopter parent. And it's definitely not what I call "reverse delegation"—where you give someone a task and then end up doing it yourself because it's easier.

Real delegation is giving someone responsibility, authority, and accountability for getting something done. Note the order: responsibility first, then authority to actually make decisions, then accountability for the results.

I worked with this fantastic team leader in Melbourne—let's call her Jenny because her name was Jennifer and she insisted everyone call her Jenny—who had mastered this. When she delegated the monthly reporting to one of her team members, she didn't just hand over the spreadsheet. She explained why the reports mattered, gave him access to all the data sources, introduced him to the stakeholders who received the reports, and then stepped back.

For the first three months, those reports weren't as polished as when Jenny did them herself. But by month four, they were better. Because the team member understood the context and purpose, not just the process.

When Teams Resist Your Leadership

Here's something they don't teach you in leadership development courses: sometimes your team will resist your leadership for perfectly valid reasons. Maybe the previous manager was a nightmare and they're gun-shy. Maybe they've seen three "new directions" in the past year and they're waiting to see if you'll stick around. Maybe you've been promoted from within the team and they're still adjusting to the new dynamic.

The temptation is to assert your authority more forcefully when you meet resistance. This is usually the wrong move. Better to understand where the resistance is coming from.

I watched one newly promoted supervisor try to implement a new scheduling system against significant pushback from his team. Instead of forcing it through, he asked each team member individually what their concerns were. Turned out they'd tried a similar system two years earlier and it had been a complete disaster. Once he understood their hesitation, he could address the specific issues that had caused problems before.

Sometimes resistance is justified. Sometimes your idea actually is rubbish, or the timing is wrong, or you haven't thought through the implications properly. Good leaders listen to resistance instead of automatically trying to overcome it.

The Feedback Trap

Most managers are terrible at giving feedback because they try to cushion everything in positivity. The whole "compliment sandwich" approach is garbage—it confuses the message and makes people focus on the wrong things.

Here's what I tell every manager I work with: feedback should be specific, timely, and focused on behaviour or results, not personality. "You're not a team player" is useless. "When you didn't share the client feedback with the rest of the team yesterday, it meant we wasted two hours working on the wrong solution" is useful.

But here's the bit that might annoy some people: not all feedback needs to be delivered with kid gloves. If someone consistently shows up late, you don't need to have a lengthy conversation about work-life balance and personal circumstances. You can say "You need to be here on time consistently" and move on.

I'm not advocating for being a monster. I'm advocating for being direct and honest instead of dancing around issues until they become major problems.

Building Trust Without Being a Pushover

There's this weird idea floating around that good leaders need to be liked by everyone. Rubbish. Good leaders need to be respected and trusted, which isn't the same thing at all.

Trust comes from consistency and competence. If you say you're going to do something, do it. If you don't know something, admit it. If you make a mistake, own it and fix it. If you need to make an unpopular decision, explain your reasoning and stand by it.

I worked with one manager who was beloved by his team but completely ineffective as a leader. He never said no to anyone, never gave critical feedback, and always took the team's side against upper management, even when they were clearly in the wrong. His team liked him personally, but they didn't respect his leadership. When crunch time came, they ignored his directions and did whatever they thought was best.

Contrast that with another manager I know who's a bit of a grump personally but is brilliant at his job. His team knows exactly where they stand with him, trusts his decisions completely, and would follow him anywhere professionally. They don't necessarily want to have a beer with him after work, but they know he's got their backs when it matters.

The Meeting Minefield

Let's be honest about meetings for a minute. Most of them are pointless wastes of time that could have been an email. But as a team leader, you need to get good at running the meetings that actually matter.

First rule: know why you're having the meeting. "Regular team catch-up" isn't a reason; it's a habit. If you can't articulate what needs to be accomplished, cancel the meeting.

Second rule: start and end on time. I don't care if half the team is running late. Start without them. They'll learn.

Third rule: make decisions. Nothing kills momentum like a meeting that ends with "we'll think about it and circle back next week." If you need more information to make a decision, assign someone to get that information and set a deadline.

I once attended a weekly team meeting that had been running for three years without making a single decision about anything. Three years! They discussed problems, shared updates, and talked about potential solutions, but never actually resolved anything. It was like corporate purgatory.

When Good Leaders Go Bad

Here's something uncomfortable: most leadership failures aren't because people are incompetent or malicious. They're because good people make predictable mistakes under pressure.

The competent individual contributor who becomes a controlling micromanager because they can't let go of the work they used to do.

The naturally empathetic person who becomes a doormat because they can't stand conflict.

The detail-oriented perfectionist who becomes a bottleneck because they need to review everything.

The results-driven achiever who burns out their team because they can't dial back the intensity.

I've made at least three of these mistakes myself over the years. The trick is recognising your natural tendencies and building systems to counteract them before they become problems.

Technology and Modern Teams

We need to talk about technology because it's changed everything about how teams work, and most leaders are still operating like it's 1995.

Your team doesn't need to be in the office five days a week to be productive. They don't need to be available 24/7 just because they have work phones. They don't need to respond to emails immediately, attend every video call, or use seventeen different collaboration platforms.

But they do need clear guidelines about communication expectations, response times, and availability. The worst thing you can do is wing it and hope everyone figures out the unspoken rules.

I know one team leader who insists on video calls for everything because she likes to "see people's faces and read their body language." Her team spends four hours a day in video calls. Four hours! They're exhausted, productivity has tanked, and half of them are looking for new jobs.

Another manager I work with has embraced asynchronous communication completely. His team rarely meets in real time, but they document everything thoroughly and make decisions efficiently. They're crushing their targets and report higher job satisfaction than any team in the company.

The tool doesn't matter. The system matters.

Building Resilient Teams

The best teams I've worked with share one characteristic: they bounce back from setbacks quickly. They don't pretend mistakes don't happen or spend weeks analysing every failure to death. They acknowledge what went wrong, figure out how to prevent it next time, and move on.

This starts with how you as the leader respond to problems. If you panic every time something goes sideways, your team will panic too. If you treat every setback like a learning opportunity (and I mean actually treat it that way, not just say the words), your team will develop the same mindset.

I remember this project manager who had a major software rollout fail spectacularly. The system crashed, data was corrupted, and clients were furious. Instead of looking for someone to blame, she immediately shifted into solution mode. "Right, what do we need to do to fix this?" Within 48 hours, they had a recovery plan, backup systems in place, and had communicated clearly with all affected clients.

Six months later, client satisfaction was higher than before the failure because they'd seen how the team handled a crisis.

The Reality Check

Here's the truth nobody wants to hear: some people aren't suited to leadership, and that's perfectly fine. Not everyone needs to manage people to have a successful career. Some of the best professionals I know are individual contributors who have no interest in leading teams, and they're brilliant at what they do.

But if you're going to lead, commit to actually leading. Don't just take the title and the money and hope things work out. Invest in your development, learn from your mistakes, and remember that your success is measured by your team's success, not your own individual achievements.

And for the love of all that's holy, stop reading business books and start talking to your actual team members. They'll tell you everything you need to know about what's working and what isn't, if you're smart enough to listen.

The best leader I ever worked for told me something I'll never forget: "My job isn't to make you successful. My job is to get out of your way so you can make yourself successful."

Seventeen years later, I still think that's the best definition of leadership I've ever heard.