Looking to improve the performance of your team? Improve the way they communicate, and you just might surprise yourself.
When we take the time to understand how people like to be communicated with and how they like to communicate with others, it changes everything. In episode 331, Erin O’Quinn is back with us to share what it takes to create a safe space for collecting ideas from members of a team so that all voices are heard and the right people get the credit for great work. You’ll hear all this through the backdrop of Erin’s experience as a team lead and people manager, and you won’t want to miss the story of how Erin shifted her personal brand to improve her own job performance in the process.
Original Recording Date: 05-14-2025
* Erin O’Quinn is a senior manager of customer advocacy at a sizable tech company. If you missed part one of our discussion with Erin detailing her early career, check out Episode 330.
Topics – Elements of Leadership and Experience as a Team Lead, Giving Others a Voice and a Space for More Contribution, The Tactics Behind the Strategy of People Management, Promotion and Personal Brand
2:49 – Elements of Leadership and Experience as a Team Lead
* To this point we’ve talked about a lot of projects with which Erin was successful, and people started to give her more. In all of these cases there were elements of leadership in getting the project accomplished by working with others. Let’s explore how Erin moved into the team lead role.
* The team lead guides a specific group of people toward a goal and is usually not the people manager of any member of the team. A team lead could be leading a team of people who report to many different managers, for example.
* Erin began leading programs in her twenties, but at first, some of her colleagues with more experience were apprehensive about Erin’s placement in that position.
* Erin remembers having great managers who would sense a conflict coming and have a conversation with people before Erin did as a form of blocking and tackling and supporting her in these situations.
* “With the team lead piece it’s figuring out how to get a successful delivery of something. You may not always run each of these people’s schedules or timelines, so it’s being that program or project manager. And you have to deliver a successful result. Usually for me, with these marketing pieces, it was to an event or to a point…. It was going to have a final point and stop. There was a put up or shut up moment that will happen for every single thing that I touched, and you will know if you succeeded or your failed because it happened or it didn’t. And if it didn’t, then we have another problem, and that’s another conversation you’ll have with your actual manager.” – Erin O’Quinn
* Erin says the team lead role is about learning how other people work, and one of her biggest challenges was figuring out how to best communicate with people. She gives a few examples:
* People take criticism and feedback differently.
* Some people are very shy in a group setting and don’t feel comfortable speaking up, while others are loud and consistently speak up in a group setting. Erin gives the example of navigating how to take feedback from the person talking the most in a meeting as well as feedback from someone who sent an e-mail or had a 1-1 conversation with you after the meeting because they were not comfortable speaking up in the meeting.
* “Being able to hear the different levels of voices as a manager of a program or a project or a team became one of the challenges that I got really excited about because I knew so many people…they were geniuses when you wou...