Do You Excite and Engage Your Team?
Do You Excite and Engage Your Team?
Peter took over responsibility for the warehousing and logistics teams. These teams didn’t have a great reputation within the business. They didn’t appear to be focused on the right things and they didn’t really operate as an effective team. They were more like a group of individuals that didn’t understand how their work impacted the next person in the work chain. They were in the bottom three teams in the engagement results of the last company engagement survey and they just didn’t seem to care! Peter had his work cut out for him but he was a leader that was up for the challenge and got immense satisfaction from turning troubled teams around.
Know your team members
Sometimes we think we know our team members but do we really? The more we can get to know our individual team members, the better our chance is of being able to engage, motivate and excite them about what we are doing and how that can benefit them in terms of their career development and growth.
One of the key mistakes leaders can make when it comes to getting the team engaged and excited about the work they are doing is they try to motivate the ‘team’. If we think about this logically though, there is no one-size-fits-all. When it comes to engagement and motivation, everyone will respond to different things and they will respond the things differently. The key is to get to know each of our employees as individuals and then utilise that knowledge to advance the team’s success. It was John Maxwell who said, “a leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” Your team members will respond best to this when they can see that what you are doing, directly relates to them in some way. No-one wants to be treated in a generic way or as a number.
So how can we get to know each of our team members better? Do you know:
What their career aspirations are?
What their personal aspirations are?
What motivates them?
What their values and preferences are?
What their unique contribution is?
What communication style they respond best to?
The effectiveness of their workplace relationships and how this helps/hinders them in achieving success?
What their professional development needs are, and do you discuss this on a regular basis?
To have our team members join us on the journey, we need to spend time understanding who they are and what is important to them. Then we can start to create some magic.
Know your own leadership style
When we want to shift the dial on engagement and motivation with our people, it makes sense that we need to have a good understanding of what engages and motivates us. This comes from having a thorough understanding of how you play your ‘inner game’. Your inner game relates to how you are when you are performing at your best (how you are most days and how others will perceive you to be); how you are you when you are either stressed or under pressure (this refers to our derailers and blind-spots and impacts our reputation so they are worth knowing and understanding); and what motives, values, and preferences do you have that drive the behaviours in the other two areas. Once we have this picture around our leadership, we are in a better position to understand how we can change our leadership style to get a better result from our people.
I often get leaders to think about the best leader they have ever had and get them to note down the traits that they liked and admired from that leader. I then get them to do the same exercise but for their worst leader. When we do this exercise, we can then look at our own leadership – what do we notice. Are we embodying some of those best traits? Have we taken on any of the behaviours in the worst leader column? This exercise requires self-reflection, with a dose of courage and a pinch of curiosity. It’s an exercise well worth doing so you can start to understand what role models have directly or indirectly impacted your leadership style. Also, how does this information now help you become the leader you always wished you had.
Know your Motive
Patrick Lencioni in his book The Motive talks about the two leadership motives:
Reward-centered leadership: the belief that being a leader is the reward for hard work; therefore, the experience of being a leader should be pleasant and enjoyable, free to choose what they work on and avoid anything mundane, unpleasant, or uncomfortable.
Responsibility-centered leadership: the belief that being a leader is a responsibility; therefore, the experience of leading should be difficult and challenging (although certainly not without elements of personal gratification).
Lencioni then goes on to say that no leader is purely one of these motives and that we all struggle at times and we will all rise and do the right thing at times. We will however have a preference toward one of these motives and that will have a profound impact on the success of the leader, their business, and their team.
There are aspects of leadership responsibilities that we may sometimes avoid, but if we want to have a lasting impact and be building a culture where everyone thrives, we need to ensure we are doing the following: building an effective leadership team; leading and managing our team members; have the difficult and challenging conversations when they need to happen; run effective meetings; constantly repeat the key messages to our people. This will serve as a solid foundation within your organisation from which great things can happen.
Leading with Impact
So, going back to our friend Peter and the huge task he had ahead of him. Peter had a clear first 100-day plan to ensure he lay the right foundations for success of these teams. A key component of that was to spend time with each team member and get clear on what was important for them. He was genuinely curious about how things were going for them. He asked lots of questions. By the end of these 100 days, Peter had started to create an environment where curiosity was the default, and his team were starting to do this with each other. Whilst there was still plenty of work to do, Peter had started by genuinely wanting to understand how the teams were finding things and what their suggestions for improvement were. 12 months later, the company completed the annual engagement survey and these teams had moved from the bottom three to one of the top three.
Working with teams is like completing a jigsaw puzzle. Every piece of the puzzle has its own specific shape which fits into its own specific spot. Without all the pieces of the puzzle, the picture is incomplete, the team is incomplete. Just as a jigsaw puzzle, we need to pay individual attention to each team member to ensure we know our people and we understand how to engage, excite and motivate them based on what truly matters.
I love working with leaders and their people to shift the dial and create winning teams. If you are looking to achieve better engagement results with your team, we should chat. I look forward to connecting with you soon.
Lead with impact,