Engage your team

Great advice about how to lead your team:
http://sixdisciplines.com/BlogRetrieve.aspx?BlogID=5880&PostID=107605

To add some personal thoughts, beyond the above link...

I believe that a good leader shields his team from internal company politics and frees up his team to do their jobs. Some of my bosses have done this very well (this is rare). Others haven't. I know that when I manage people this will be one of the main things I will strive to do. I think I already do it informally.

This point was driven home to me a long time ago, when I was relatively new to the working world. My boss and I took MBA classes at night, and we always took the same class (copy notes when one of us was traveling, study together, do projects together, etc.). In one of those classes we took Myers-Briggs tests (Wikipedia link, MBTI Basics from www.myersbriggs.org). We evaluated ourselves and our companies, with the goal being to see how well we matched the culture of our companies.

The results were fascinating. I was a great match for my company at the time (Cooper Power Systems, my first job out of college), which matched my subjective impressions. I was doing fun work, learning a lot, and working with great people. My boss' test results didn't match the company so well, however. Out of curiosity we compared our impressions of our company, and surprisingly (or not) found them to be very different. How could that be? Comparing my impression of the company with my boss' impression of himself cleared it up: They were nearly a perfect match. I saw the company as a great match for me because (1) my boss was a great match for me, and (2) my boss shielded me from all the politics and other negative stuff about the company very well.

For what it's worth, I still remember that boss as one of the two best bosses I've ever had (the other goes back even further, to when I was a waiter trying to pay for college, but that's another story entirely!). I stay in contact with him to this day.