When you bring out the best in your team members you put yourself in a robust position to surpass your own goals and reach your own critical milestones.
And the way that you treat your team members has a humongous impact on the way that they behave. Often it’s the primary determinant.
So that you can elicit the behaviours and discretionary effort you’re after, I highly recommend that you get cyrstal clear about precisely what behaviours you want to see in each of your team members—and then crystal clear about what practices and behaviours you personally need to adopt.
How Do You Want Your Team Members To Behave?
You’ve no doubt thought about what goals and targets you want your team members to achieve, but have you contemplated exactly how you want your team members to behave?
For example, is it that you want them to be:
- Enthusiastic and energetic—rather than lethargic?
- Thoughtful and courageous—rather than risk averse?
- Collaborative—rather than competitive and siloed in their thinking?
- Goal focussed—rather than indecisive and time wasting?
They sound like pretty good behaviours that are likely to produce pretty good results, don’t they?
What behaviours would you advocate for your team members?
How Do You Therefore Need To Behave?
Given that the way your team members behave is largely determined by the way you behave, let’s also carefully consider this other side of the ledger…
There’s no doubt in my mind that to motivate discretionery effort and high performance it’s fundamental that your team members have a strong sense of rapport with you, that they trust you and that they feel valued and respected by you.
Let’s think through the practices and behaviours you need to display so that they experience rapport, trust, feeling valued and feeling respected by you.
Here are some thought starters:
- Develop alignment with them on their KPIs and goals
—Then get out of their way. Trust them to think for themselves. Let go of your need to closely control.
- Regularly acknowledge them
—Let them know exactly what you appreciate about their efforts and their work.
- Communicate lots with them
—Communicate beyond the norm. Tell them more than they expect to hear from you.
- Be warm and heartfelt with them
—Find things to like about them, and then, when you interact with them, smile and remember that you like them and care about their wellbeing.(By the way, you might be one of those many leaders who needs to better manage their stress so that they can authentically connect with others. Do you need to think about what you’re prepared to do so that you’re less stressed?)
Flesh out this list so it applies perfectly to you and the characteristics of your team members.
Your Leadership Call to Action
Once you’ve vigilantly described your ideal team member behaviours and what behaviours you need to display so that you elicit them, your focal point needs to be on what you need to do to habituate those behaviours.
The norm for behavioural habituation is to focus on just one or two behaviours consistently for 30-days—so you’ll want to work out a system that’ll have your focus this narrow and highly consistent for 30-days.
(Don’t try and change more than two behaviours at once. They’re highly unlikely to change unless you have a strong focus on each one.)
Please keep me posted on your thinking and how you’re traveling. And as always, give me a yell if you want support.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Carolyn Stevens has worked with leaders for more than 25-years—hundreds of them.
She’s supported leader after leader (including those who previously struggled to confront the difficult, let alone persuasively deal with the it) flourish—and become confident, courageous and impressively influential.
Carolyn is authentic and results-oriented. She draws on an eclectic array of approaches, tools and techniques to suit the situation.
