Engaging with Your Team
Boosts Performance
Engaging with your team is no small feat! There are many people on your team and you need to be in relationship with each one of them.
Finding the sweet spot of having a personable relationship in a professional setting often eludes business leaders, but it doesn’t need to any longer! This is essential for you to consistently work on because research reveals it directly impacts your business’s performance.
In our last post, We need great leaders to guide, we discuss the five roles in business and how your team and/or staff isn’t engaged. The research reveals they’re in burn-out, dissatisfied, and they’re unmotivated. This all negatively impacts a business’s bottom-line. Is it impacting yours? Go back and read that short article if you haven’t yet.
That post also introduced how people want to be valued and not barked at by a Boss. In fact the research reveals, the “boss” role isn’t what businesses need now. They need to shift their approach, or style, from boss to coach.
Simplifying leadership in the 21st century is about creating authentic relationships with people.
Simplifying 21st Century Leadership
Engaging with your team doesn’t need to be complicated. If you allow it to be, it’s a pretty simple approach.
What if every day for 5 minutes or less, you’d have a conversation with your direct reports or immediate team? Instead of texting or emailing, you would walk over to them, jump on a video conference line to see each others’s faces and ask, “How may I help/support/serve you today?”
Oh my! Yes, it can be this simple. Of course, the next thing you do is to intently listen to understand how you can best support them. They exist in their role to support you. Help them become more effective and efficient by learning what they need and how you can help make their working experience better.
When this is accomplished everyone wins! They win, you win, and the business’s performance improves.
Tips for Engaging with Your Team
Don’t start this until you are ready to commit to it becoming a consistent behavior for yourself. The last thing everyone needs is another initiative that isn’t followed through. Don’t make this an initiative – it’s bound to fail if you do it as such.
Share, one-to-one, that you’ll be starting to have a 5 minute (or less) face-to-face daily conversation with them. During that time you’d like to know what they need and want to do their job more effectively and efficiently and anything else they’d like to share that you need to know. (This way they won’t freak-out why you’re doing this.)
The first question you should ask them as you begin your 5 Minute Face TimeTM , “How are you today, ______?” And listen to what they are saying. (They want to be acknowledged as a person and feel valued). Make this quick, but authentically engaging.
The second question, “How may I help/support/serve you today?” Again, listen intently. Share whatever you need to at this point to advance their work.
The third question, “Anything else I may assist you with today or this week?”
Then confirm you will do what you can today to assist and will follow-up tomorrow.
Do your follow-up in your next conversation. Even if it’s that you still need more time to do X. Make sure you deliver, even if it’s more complicated.
Notes for Engaging with Your Team
- You must listen – be present to their conversation with you.
- Take notes – it shows them what they’re saying is important to you.
- Do your follow-up. If they perform better, your life becomes easier. Their needs are your priorities! Behave as such.
- Don’t drop the ball. Deliver or communicate when something isn’t happening.
- If they feel valued, they will perform better. Be cordial. Be kind. It goes a long way.
- Be consistent! Make sure you are doing this daily with folks. If a weekly conversation is more appropriate, make this a weekly event.
- Schedule these conversations on your calendar. They are equally important as any other meeting you are having!
With all the hi-tech communication tools we have, we have forgotten that being human and being in relationship as humans is important. It’s important for business and perhaps even more so for the humans who make up a business. Let’s get back to some basics. Ultimately it will boost your and your business’s performance.
Feel free to add a comment below about how you see this improving your business and its relationships.
THANKS FOR ALLOWING ME TO HELP YOU IMPROVE YOUR BUSINESS!
Brilliant Breakthroughs, Inc.
Making it possible to Simplify, Transform,
& Optimize Small Business Success!
Maggie Mongan, #1 Bestselling Author
Master Business Coach & Trainer
Brilliant Breakthroughs, Inc.
Direct Dial: 262-716-7750
LinkedIn: MaggieMongan
P.S.: Create brilliant outcomes through making better decisions in real-time.
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