You’re a new leader. Perhaps you’ve been a leader and you have just been promoted to lead a new team. Perhaps you joined your company from the outside. It won’t take long before you hear a familiar phrase from your manager. You’ve got to get the wrong people off the bus and get the right people on the bus. Or train. Or plane. Pick your metaphor.
Leadership in business is not the same as managing your fantasy football team. In fantasy football, you hire statistics. Your players have no interdependency on each other, unless you happen to select two players who are actually on the same real team. Business is different.
I’ve always struggled with the bus thing. From the top of the organization, it seems efficient. Decisive. After all, we want our managers to be both of those things, right?
I’m not specifically talking about managing performance here. That’s a given and you need to be really good at that as a leader. I’m talking about organizations that are in constant upgrade mentality. In sports, it’s the difference between winning through free agency and winning by building and sustaining a cohesive team.
For the manager who is closest to the people who are sitting on the bus, it can seem harsh. You may have become vested in building your team, and in developing team members to their potential. You’ve begun building relationships with these people. You’re starting to understand the synergies between your team members. You’re seeing who works well together, how problems are getting solved, where good ideas are coming from.
The challenge is that almost none of this great work with your team is visible above you. Your manager might have a sense of your team building strategy, but go up one more level in your organization and it becomes irrelevant. Senior managers default to the leadership playbooks they’ve become familiar with, and the bus thing is on page one. You are expected to follow that playbook too.
Last summer my family and I visited Italy. I haven’t had to travel internationally for business and my family hadn’t been to Europe either, so we decided to use an organized tour since we were inexperienced. We had a great trip and made our way around Italy within that safety net. On our trip we had two bus experiences.
The first was with our tour group. Over ten days, we spent time together on our tour bus traversing the best cities in Italy. We started out as a group of 40 strangers, and by the end of our trip we really knew each other quite well. We pretty much knew what to expect from each other. We knew who would be on time and who wouldn’t. Who we could have fun with. We made lots of friends. Together we learned about Italy. We collaborated on what we wanted to see and experience, and we reviewed our discoveries together. It was like we were a team. We stay in touch with quite a few of our bus mates.
The second was during our time in Florence. My family and I took a public bus from our hotel to the downtown sites. We were truly with strangers. People got on the bus and people got off the bus. We looked at the other passengers, sized them up, and watched our wallets. The thought of engaging with other passengers didn’t cross our minds. We were there for pure transportation purposes. Get where we were going and get off, in one piece, with all our stuff. No lasting relationships here.
To say these were two different bus ride experiences is an understatement. The first was a journey. We sat down and relaxed. We talked about where we came from and we talked about our destination, and we enjoyed the journey. The second was a ride from point to point. We stood. We looked constantly out the windows to see if we were at our stop. We couldn’t wait to get off. We didn’t want to be there. We just wanted to be at the next place.
Are you managing your team as a tour bus? Do your team members interact well? Are they collaborating and solving problems together? Are they sharing their stories about where they’ve been and about where they’re heading? Do they share their discoveries and build upon those? Are they relishing the journey you are on together?
Or, are you driving a public bus? Are you trying to get people on and off your bus quickly? Are you hoping that when the music stops you’ll have the right people on the bus? Do you let everyone fend for themselves? Do they keep an eye on their own stuff? Stare out the window to see when they can get off your bus?
To me, that’s the problem with the bus metaphor for managers. It works on the assumption that employees want to be on your bus, no matter what. When that holds true, all the manager has to do is pick and choose the right people, and stay within the company guardrails on how to move people on and off the bus.
But that assumption is highly flawed. Just like our Italian vacation, there are some buses I really don’t want to ride. If you’re driving a tour bus, you’ve got me. I’ll be your best passenger. If you’re driving the public bus, don’t expect a whole lot from me. I’m only going to be on your bus until I can get off and find something better.
Pay attention to the people who are already on your team. Appreciate who they are. Don’t be too quick to exit them from your team. Focus your efforts on establishing the vision you want your team to work toward and set the expectation that having a seat on your bus means that the rider is totally committed to supporting the team’s achievement of that vision. Give each person the opportunity to make that commitment and demonstrate they belong on the bus. Make your decisions after you give each person that chance and don’t make your call on individuals beforehand.
Many leaders make the mistake, in my opinion, of changing the riders too quickly. I’ve seen it. Teams dissolve. Chemistry and cohesiveness suffer. Instead of moving forward quickly, there is damage to repair and the team takes a step backward, at least temporarily.
Be careful about the bus advice. There are no short cuts to being an effective and compassionate modern leader of people. It’s not a game.
Lead well.
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