We coach, develop and work alongside leaders and teams to shift ideas on leadership and provide the skills and tools needed to grow teams.
An extraordinary set of economic, social and immigration factors seems to have landed us with a perfect storm of retention and recruitment challenges. This means leaders and organisations really need to get proactive about managing their capacity.
Many of today’s professionals spend a lot of time working from home, facing feelings of isolation, and dealing with a wide range of new change related stresses and challenges. For example, we have heard many stories of people changing jobs during lockdown periods and not being able to work in the office or meet their team members face to face for months.
We know that for teams to maximise the potential of their diversity, they need to regularly use techniques like perspective getting, encouraging contribution, group brainstorming and collaborative problem solving. But none of those practices works particularly well without high levels of psychological safety.
OK, I’m going to start this off by saying ‘I do!’
I like positive feedback. I like to know that my work or my relationships add value to others. That doesn’t mean I only want positive feedback, but it really helps to know that (and why) I am appreciated.
And I think all people find that genuine appreciation motivating, (even if at times little embarrasing).
“That went well! – I bet we’ll hear from them today!” two reps celebrate as they ride a lift down from a prospective customer’s office.
A manager challenges one of her colleagues: “I’m not sure what happened there. I think she may have taken your comments as a bit blunt. I’ll speak with her and let you know. ”
Answer: It depends how often you engage, what you talk about, and how much directing you do with your people.
Precaution: I have never met a person that agreed they were a micromanager, that didn’t also rationalise what they were doing as being a good thing for several, or many reasons. Most micromanagers do what they do with the best of intentions.
When facilitating team workshops or meetings we typically see at least one or two team members who don’t seem to contribute much.
Like most of us, you will be really busy just coping with your daily mountain of work.Of course, when you hear an idea that can help you improve how you tackle that work, you take notice and maybe get inspired.
We often ask leadership teams to review themselves against these four groupings.
At this point we introduce the Katzenbach & Smith definition of a team:
Maintaining trust in a team that has to work remotely is challenging, but there are some preventative and responsive steps you can take.
Here are a few techniques and tips to help your group work remotely but together.
As early as possible, agree the protocols or ground rules for your team calls or chats (I’ll call these ‘collabs’ from here on). For example, do you need to see each other the entire time or is audio-only fine? …
If we thought we were living in a VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) before, what are we experiencing now?
People can do crazy stuff when they are threatened enough and start looking out for themselves at the expense of others…
We frequently hear senior managers complaining that the managers beneath them are working a level down; that is, they are doing some or a lot of the work that their own people should be doing.
Most teams suffer from the occasional conflict and team members losing their cool.
We work with a lot of teams, some of these have members who are competitive with each other and as a result struggle to leave the storming stage. Others move past this and capitalise on real synergy. This is the story of one leadership team that had some touchy issues and what they did about it.
The Neuroleadership Institute has done a lot of work, presented in their recent webinar, to try to understand what precisely it is about greater organisational diversity that causes higher performance. What they found is that diversity actually impacts performance at the team level.