By Nick Gold, MD, Speakers Corner
Does Your Team Struggle to Commit and Execute?
3 minute read
As team leaders, you will have KPIs to adhere to, and sometimes it is a struggle to bring your team along on your shared vision and goals.
As a result, your team becomes unmotivated, unproductive, and disengaged, when instead, you want them to have clarity, confidence, and commitment to achieve their goals with integrity.
So, what can you do to combat this?
Start implementing the CARES method:
COMMUNICATION
Have open and honest communication policies and channels in place to encourage employees to voice their concerns or ideas – without fear of retribution or ridicule.
Each person has a different communication style and if you want to be an inspiring leader that gets results from teams that trust you, then you need to know and understand their language and how to communicate the message to them through the appropriate channel.
A quick way to do this is to establish the purpose of the message. What do you want to achieve with this communication or message? Is it for them to action your new rules, to be alert of new policies or simply to communicate a recent win? Always make sure that you know what the purpose of the message is, then confirm with the team that they understood it from the same starting point. Meaning, do you want them to take action after the message has been received or is it to keep them informed on general news - FYI?
ACCEPT
Encourage a culture of inclusivity, diversity, and equality, where everyone’s opinion matters, and their difference is seen as a strength. Find ways to celebrate each other’s wins and remember to lead by example and share your own too.
RESPECT & RISK-TAKING
Be willing to put yourself out there and try something new. We can only grow if we feel uncomfortable at the moment, so find ways to challenge your employees, but make sure that they have adequate support to prevent overwhelm and burnout. For instance, an employee seeks advancement, so you give them more responsibilities. After a few months, the employee takes excessive leave and before long, resigns. As a leader, you might be confused, as you thought that they were doing well and wanted more challenges, but the problem is, they did not get adequate support, either through training, more money, status, or acknowledgement. Always encourage growth, but make sure support is in place.
ELASTIC
Be willing to adapt, be open-minded and remain curious. We live in a constant flux of change, and we need to remain elastic so that we can unlearn bad behaviours and learn new and healthy habits instead. This is the moment where you and the team need to ditch assumptions.
Most of us get comfortable in our position and end up stagnating. We stop calling new prospective clients because the last five people we spoke to said they are all financially tied up at the moment. Then we sit around the cafeteria, complaining that everyone is struggling financially, and we all nod our heads in silent relief because none of us likes rejection. This is an easy way out, our excuse for not calling new clients because we silently agreed on the assumption that the entire 9 billion population is struggling.
You see how absurd this is, 5 people do not represent 100,000 people that could be your potential clients. An average would be 25,000 saying the same thing, and then you have only approached ¼ of potential clients.
SHARED VISION
Do you know what your company values and what its vision is? Bring your team on this journey by allowing them to share in feedback sessions to discover and embrace their thoughts in the process. When you take your team on a journey instead of simply presenting it to them, then you have their buy-in, and loyalty and ultimately, they will trust you because they will feel heard, appreciated and included.
About the Author:
Lynn Erasmus is a multi-award-winning entrepreneur, speaker, happiness coach and facilitator. She connects leaders with their teams, by helping them understand their core values, vision and team strengths and then bringing them together on the same journey. She delivers these outcomes through interactive keynotes, fun away days, focused masterclasses, and in-depth coaching sessions.
