At its best, good leadership gives clarity, direction, and energy. It’s one of many ways to boost employee engagement and satisfaction while making businesses more profitable.
At its worst, poor leadership fosters apathy, disengagement and even toxicity. Last year, 79% of employees that quit cited a lack of appreciation amongst leadership as a core reason for leaving.
Clearly then, being a good leader is critical. But why and how can business leaders drive success?
Too often leadership is spoken about in isolation, a solitary role defined by a series of traits; boldness, compassion, and vision to name a few. But good leadership is much more about how one interacts with and motivates a team, rather – than individual characteristics it is – as Will It Make the Boat Go Faster define it, leading is exciting others to exceptional performance. Accordingly, the best leadership is far more comparable to an elite sports team, than an individual pursuit.
To celebrate National Boss Day here are five tips to take gold with your team.
Create a psychologically safe environment.
In 2018, Pew Research found that 89% of employees believe that workplace psychological safety is essential. But what is psychological safety and how can you create it in your workplace?
Psychological safety is the absence of interpersonal fear, or when people feel that they can speak up. In the workplace, a psychologically safe environment engenders trust, which is crucial to bringing out the best in your team. Trust gives people the confidence to take healthy risks, it promotes creativity and people feel secure, which is vital in an evolving or growing company.
As leaders, your role in this is to create space for everyone to speak up and check in on your team. Have a think about how this looks in your organisation, can you set up meetings to create space for everyone in your team?
Encourage feedback, good and bad.
On par, research shows that everyone wants more feedback, and it makes sense. Feedback helps people gauge their value, strengths and how they can improve which is ultimately what you as leaders want for your team.
As a leader, you’re in a unique position to implement constant feedback as a feature of your organisation.
Importantly feedback should always be productive and balanced, equal parts highlighting the positive and identifying ways to grow. Too much positive feedback creates a halo-effect, where wins are seen as a product of personal affect and losses are out of one's control. Whereas too much negative feedback results in confidence loss and apathy.
An underrated feedback mechanism, the evidence wall is a visible record of past wins and achievements that the team are proud of. Try this by getting your team to share recent highlights, from small wins to day-to-day performance ingredients they’re proud of. Seeing these accomplishments helps people contextualise the challenges ahead and visualise how to keep moving and improve.
Ensure that everyone understands their contribution.
As leaders, you’re responsible for ensuring that everyone understands their contribution to overarching organisational goal or ‘Crazy goal’. Too often, teams have a defined goal but individually, people are confused about their contribution. If you asked your team what the overarching goal is, would they all say the same thing? If not, consider taking some time to ensure they understand their contribution.
You can help people understand their role by; tying feedback to the wider goal, regularly linking back to the end goal, and identifying targets that are in place to realise that goal.
Get to know your team.
Understanding values in your team will help you create space for your team to link their personal drivers to overarching organisational goals. Some people are driven by external factors, like recognition and financial gain and others are driven by more intrinsic factors, like pride and creativity.
Understanding where people are on this spectrum will help you work out how to best motivate them and perhaps, more importantly contribute to their wider sense of purpose and satisfaction at work.
Create team rules.
The process of creating a set of team rules is valuable because it requires a clear goal and, it clarifies how the team would like to go about meeting that goal.
To be effective, these rules need to be co-created by everyone, reflect people’s drivers and be specific to your organisation or project.
These rules inspire and encourage, but they also keep everyone accountable which is crucial to getting stuff done.
Building leadership skills and a strong team takes time, but the payoffs are huge. Both play a role in setting the tone for engagement, motivation, and productivity which in turn, produces results. Try using the above tips to get started on taking your gold.
About the authors:
Cath Bishop is a leadership coach for Will It Make the Boat Go Faster. Prior to coaching teams and unlocking potential Cath was a medal winning Olympic athlete, author and diplomat.
Ben Hunt Davis is an Olympic gold medallist and founder of Will It Make the Boat Go Faster. Today, Ben takes what he uses the lessons that he learnt from building a successful Olympic team to help businesses move their own boat faster.
Will It Make the Boat Go Faster are a specialist coaching team that helps businesses achieve their goals and clarify their purpose, for some clients this resulted in a 35% increase in revenue and employee engagement reaching 77%.
