As a leader, creating effective, respectful, and proper connections is a critical ingredient for success. Success at every level. From personal reasons, team success to organizational outcomes. We've all seen and experienced where unproductive and ineffective connections will drive poor results, lack of accountability and collaboration, incredible frustration and worry, finger pointing and conflict, dis-engagement, and turnover to name a few.
Unfortunately, leaders can easily and unknowingly contribute to a team member failing to meet expectations. How? By failing to understand their motives and how they choose their strengths in achieving the most effective results successfully and consistently for themselves, the team, the organization.
Leaders must first understand how their team members work and really who they are at their core. This is where communication and connecting as a leader is crucial, as leaders often have a better view of all the factors at play and the larger goals of the organization. Helping team members understand - and even more importantly, making them feel like they are a part of things - is a vital component to creating a trusting connection and a great working relationship.
In creating positive relationships and overcoming conflict, it’s important too to understand that in the decisions employees make, they may be seeking to protect their own interests, and simply acting in a way that feels best in the moment. And after conflict has occurred, once the initial anxiety passes, team members may find themselves avoiding the person with whom they did not see eye-to-eye, or retreating into silence, or getting defensive. All of these are natural behaviors, and leaders need to understand and look for the signs of conflict and relationships going sour before these things affect the output of the team.
Deloitte recently found that three specific items correlated best with high performance teams: "My co-workers are committed to doing quality work," "The mission of our company inspires me," and "I have the chance to use my strengths every day." Of these, the third was the most powerful across the organization. So, the defining characteristics of the very best teams is that they are strengths oriented where their members feel that they are called upon to do their best work everyday.
That begs an important question. How is your organization spending more time helping your people use their strengths in teams characterized by great clarity of purpose and expectations?
Connecting with people professionally is not separate from how leaders react in the rest of life or relationships. Managing and leading effectively requires leaders to communicate, to engage in dialogue, to listen and pay good attention, to behave with the express intent that helps the other person feel valued and understood, respected, and safe in all their engagements with you. To secure agreement, acceptance and understanding of what is involved, what’s expected, by whom and by when. So when relationships do sour, the cause is often very simple: ambiguity and in-authenticity.
Team members will do what they say they will if they feel safe in their decisions - leaders cannot make the mistake of trying to forcing those decisions. Similarly, leaders must make an effort to not force information or viewpoints that won’t work or serve the goals of the team well; at this point, leaders must step back and stop trying to be the smartest person in the room. This show of trust allows the team to respect and rely on their leader, fostering a relationship of mutual collaboration toward the goals everyone has agreed upon.
If team members are not comfortable with their leaders, they’ll not be comfortable with decisions made for them, and goals may become obscured by the relationships. People have trouble accepting terms and measures of success if they never bought in to the framework from the beginning. At this point, leaders that try to prove that what they have is better for the team, risk everyone else avoiding any kind of commitment, or even backing out completely.
Leaders must learn be authentic enough to admit when they are not happy with the results they’re getting and look at their own communication and leadership style to address these relationships and issues.
What are your thoughts on leadership and team success? How is Deloitte on to something very powerful about teams and strengths? We would love to hear from you with comments or questions. Send me a note via email at brad@aperiocoaching.net or on Twitter @bparcells.
No comments:
Post a Comment