This article is meant to help entrepreneurs, business owners and executives at any level to navigate easier in building the right environment for their teams. Hence delivering sustainably great results in their firms, based on inspiring leadership and shared culture. 

 

What is the Impact on your organization?

Even if your firm has a well-structured business plan with aggressive goals and numbers to achieve, its implementation may not be that straightforward. Your team may be saying they are on-board with that plan, but their actions don’t seem to support the growth, or their behavior does not show the same proactive approach as yourself. New ideas and concepts on how to improve the business and its processes are not part of the daily life of your team.

 

To dominate the game called business, you need to develop in 3 important areas on both personal and team level, that will support hitting the numbers and your targets:

Personal:                    Team:

Ambition                    Authority 

Action                         Accountability 

Attitude                      Alignment (organizational Alignment)

 

If you have been successful implementing the above into your organization, it will transform into a well-oiled, self-sustaining and constantly improving business organization, which operates with:

  • Less stress at the workplace
  • Higher motivation
  • Higher improvement proposal rate
  • Better people engagement
  • Lower staff turnover
  • Lower costs
  • Better profits

This is all good and sounds like dream come true for the most executives and business owners, but the big question remains: How to get there? 

Assess the levels of Engagement of your team

To understand the current status and what needs to be done for our team to be more engaged, we need to turn the mirror to ourselves. Put yourself in the shoes of one of your team members for a moment and consider: 

  • What are their thoughts and feelings in the current situation? 
  • What is it like to be part of this team? 
  • Is there a culture of sharing information and establishing clear company goals that are transparent and well communicated with the team? What are the processes supporting that culture?
  • Does the team understand the company purpose on a deeper, more humane level than just achieving profits as a business? Do they care about this purpose? 
  • How does everyone’s responsibilities are defined and are they clear enough so there are no grey areas nor unclear roles? 
  • Does my team receive recognition for their achievements? 
  • What is the morale like? Is it high or this is something I have neglected so far? 
  • Are there clear KPI’s and performance metrics? Are they agreed and well understood between the team members? 
  • Is there an open-door policy so that all employees can come share thoughts and ideas with me and between themselves freely? 
  • Do people in my team at all levels feel that are treated with respect and dignity? By myself, the company, between themselves?

You may not be ready to hear all the answers on the above questions, but as soon as you manage to face the truth about your current situation – the quicker it will be for you and for your team to change the course and establish the right culture to facilitate growth.

Assess the levels of Empowerment of your team

Once you have the proper understanding about your team culture and the engagement of the people in your firm, your work is not finished yet. The second area we need to consider is how empowered people are to drive the growth towards your ambitions. 

 

Needless to say – it is all about your leadership and how you build the confidence muscle in your team to get there sooner and better. Consider the following areas as checkpoints for improvement:

  • Does my team operate on the basis of solving and taking autonomous decisions without consulting me?
  • Do they use team-based problem-solving techniques or each member is operating independently? 
  • Is my team willing to walk the extra mile and has the initiative to resolve unassigned tasks or problems? 
  • Am I comfortable to share my decision making with them?
  • Is my team recognized for their achievements on all levels – both by myself and the company as a whole? 
  • Is the team responsible for their results produced? 
  • What is the communication in the team like? 
  • Are all the team members working in alignment – all looking and going in the same direction?
  • Does the team receive necessary support for their personal development from me and the company on top of their professional goals? 
  • Do I use coaching with my people as much as formal task assignment?

Now, after having good overview of the scene both from the perspectives of engagement and empowerment, you need to work on 

The process for engaging and empowering your Dream team

Culture is the single most important factor in achieving successful change. It underpins everything and if implemented correctly gives you a positive loop for constant improvement of your business. 

The Key ingredients of exemplary culture at the workplace includes:

  • Good / Transparent communication
  • Coaching more than telling
  • Removing fear and building people self-confidence and reliance 
  • Breaking-down barriers
  • Encouraging people development
  • Encouraging creativity and innovation
  • Establishing support structure in place
  • Your Commitment. The single biggest reason for failure to achieve change is lack of senior management commitment (ref to Org Alignment article for Commitment of CEO)

Below are 3 +2 simple tools for engaging and empowering a team. When used as a team-based process they act as an amplifier for achieving engagement and empowerment in your team. 

  1. Brainstorming / Focus Groups
  2. Pareto 80/20 rule / The Black Swan Effect
  3. Flow chart / Business Process Design visualization of the key business processes with a RACI chart

Whether you will decide to start a project for establishing your team culture in a formal manner or you will use your next team-building event or an annual All-hands meeting – these tools will provide you with focused and high-quality input as a starting point. Then it is up to you to build upon it and to keep on top of your head the importance of your firm’s culture in order to sustain the development goals of your business and provide meaning to your team members. Use coaching, delegate, provide mentoring, support the personal growth of your people together with their hard-skills needed for their roles, be the example and the leader they will follow without hesitation and there you are – your business thrives.

Putting it all together: Assess the impact of your engaged and empowered team

Consider yourself 12-18 month ahead after you read this article and have implemented the ideas found here. What has changed for you? For your team? How better do you operate as a firm? How does your customers feel that difference? What are the outcomes from the joint efforts in terms of business targets met and financial results? How easier could that be for you and your business if you had a coach to partner with and to navigate you in this change? What lessons did you learn from this journey? What would have costed you if you didn’t apply this change and did not evolve as an organization?

Was it worth it?