How to Make Your Team the Best It Can Be
Imagine a world where your boss genuinely cares about you, where he or she nurtures you, recognizes and rewards you fairly, always taking time to acknowledge your hard work and dedication. Not only that, but they respect you and support your professional growth.
Whether or not this is your reality, there are a number of management professionals whom have seen the results that come from leaders who are clear-sighted, encouraging, and kind. In recent books and speeches, Beverly Kaye, Sharon Jordan-Evans, Marcus Buckingham, Curt Coffman, Dan Pink, and Daniel Goleman propose loving your staff by understanding their professional goals, supporting their growth, and relieving the pressures between family and work as some of the golden keys to bringing out your team’s top performance. Whilst treating your staff well in order to keep them might seem obvious, some industries, like retail and customer service, experience annual turnover rates as high as 30-40%. This is a serious loss for any company as the average cost of replacing key talent is to two to five times their annual salary, depending on their degree of specialization.
As the saying goes, “people don’t leave companies they leave managers”; our authors say, if you are thinking about the long-term cultural and financial success of your organization, you need to understand your impact on employee satisfaction and retention.
1. Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em
“Good managers are people you keep in touch with even after you leave a position. Bad managers are people you keep track of so you can avoid them in future.”
In their book, Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em Approach, Kaye and Jordan-Evans define inspirational leadership with twenty-six strategies to engage teams with empathy, mentorship and by engagement. This process of loving your team, starts right from the hiring process because recruiting the right people for the job increases the likelihood of keeping them. Specifically, they instruct leaders to have stay interviews with their employees. A regular dialogue about the performance and wellbeing of team members creates a relationship similar to mentorship. This two-way dialogue gives team members a sense of autonomy, and an ownership of their work. Other strategies include what they call ‘Getting Friendly’ which involves asking yourself whether your employees have to choose between work and family and ‘Knowing the Talents’ of your team members through honest career discussions. These discussions should be shaped by line management asking questions about employees’ unique skills, interests and values, listening diligently to their responses and following up with probing questions to discover more.
From a survey of 18,000 people Kaye and Jordan-Evans carried out, they go on to list thirteen drivers behind why people stay in an organisation with a top five including:-
1) Exciting, challenging and meaningful work
2) Supportive management
3) Being recognized, valued and respected
4) Career growth, learning and development
5) Flexible work environment
‘Fair pay’ ranks seventh place on the list, showing that although it can dissatisfy staff, even fair pay won’t help you retain unhappy team members. What we can see from this top five list is that developing a supportive culture centered around growth and learning and paying attention to the specific needs of your team makes the critical difference.
2. Recognise the Impact of your Role
“The front-line manager is the key to attracting and retaining talented employees. No matter how generous its pay or how renowned its training, the company that lacks great front-line managers will suffer.”
These words, written by business consultants Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman in their 2005 New York Times Bestseller, Break all the Rules, highlight a common misunderstanding of traditional methods used to attract highly talented staff. It is strong management that plays the central role in determining whether your staff choose to stay or go rather than pay or benefits and perks. For example, Google offers their employees 5 months of paid paternity leave, free gourmet food, and the opportunity to work on personal projects 20% of the time. Despite this, Google ranked fourth worst on a list of the Fortune 500 ranking employee turnover from worst to best in a Quora thread last year. As well as this, Google experiences high turnovers with the average tenure for new employees being just over one year.
In their book Kaye and Jordan – Evans argue that the buck stop at managers who should be held accountable for creating a retention culture where colleagues feel motivated, cared about and rewarded. During their research, the pair found that when asked, most supervisors thought financial reward retains good people. The gross error in this perspective is that this places the responsibility for retention in the hands of those who control the purse strings.
In actual fact, Kaye and Jordan-Evans state that front-line management matter most with the power to influence their teams in the key factors that satisfy and engage colleagues; including meaningful and challenging work, a chance to learn and grow, great coworkers, recognition, respect and a good leader.
3. Be a Coach — Not a Boss
“Become the kind of leader that people would follow voluntarily; even if you had no title or position.” —Brian Tracy
A 2012 Towers Watson survey showed that 80% employees were ‘Highly engaged’ when management encouraged new ideas. Dan Pink, author and motivational speaker on the changing workplace, argues that motivating employees by coaching instead of bossing them is the key to driving loyalty. He defines a true leader as a coach instead of a boss because they generate motivation by connecting with their team, rather than through fear. As he explains, a coach thinks and says ‘we’ instead of ‘I’, he doesn’t blame others when the stakes are down, and he doesn’t take all of the credit. Furthermore, coaches depend on their employees’ own goodwill and show appreciation for hard work. While bosses tend to give orders, a coach listens to the opinions of their colleagues, regarding them important.
When a boss relies too heavily on their authority, inspiring fear and taking undue credit, they end up driving a ‘blame’ culture that stifles individual creativity.
In summary coaches make stronger leaders because they are a part of the team, not external to it. Their success rises from a genuine appreciation from their co-workers and their positive reputation.
4. Relationships Matter: Emotional Intelligence
Echoing Pink’s argument for ‘goodwill’ over ‘authority’ is Daniel Goleman, a writer for the Harvard Business Review. He states that using ‘emotional intelligence’ to build strong relationships is a core feature of great leaders. In Goleman’s research of nearly 200 large, global companies, he found the traditional qualities associated with leadership–including intelligence, toughness, determination, and vision—are ‘insufficient.’
Emotional Intelligence, [is a phrase coined by Wayne Payne’s 1985 doctoral thesis, A Study of Emotion: Developing Emotional Intelligence] as shorthand for a combination of specific qualities, including self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. An emotionally intelligent leader recognizes their effect on others, and is able to redirect disruptive impulses and moods. Not only are they self-aware, but they have the ability to understand the emotional character of their staff members, and are proficient in building a rapport with them while pursuing team goals with energy and persistence.
5. Be Genuine
“With good leadership, corporate culture isn’t forced, it is developed.”
In plain terms, you should not and cannot pretend to be a strong leader. Neither can honesty be faked. In fact, employees appreciate transparency and an honest approach from leadership which generates a culture of trust within an organization. This trust can be a positive factor in achieving the main goal of any team: to work more cohesively, all together.
The best way to gain your team’s respect is to identify the weak areas of your leadership skills and begin to adopt some of the key principles of effective leadership. Just as bad leadership trickles down throughout an organization to every level, good leadership has the potential to shake up a corporate culture of bosses and drastically improve the working conditions for the staff, making it a great place to work for everyone. With some economists foreshadowing a labor crisis, strong talent is set to become harder to find and retain. A smart company invests in and builds the leadership skills of it’s managers, and while taking their staff’s needs, ideas and trust very seriously. This is set to be one of the tests of success facing the post-economic crisis organization.
By Louise Ogunseitan
