The 4 Critical Elements of a Great Team Leader Critical Element #2: Treat People Well.

?Critical Element #2: Treat People Well

Talented people are the lifeblood of successful organizations. And talent has been disrupted in a major way—by COVID. There isn’t one industry not seriously affected by the “Great Resignation.”?After an extended time of isolation, illness and even death of people near to them, many survivors are asking fundamental life questions causing the re-evaluation of everything including work. Also, baby boomers are eligible to retire at staggering numbers—some estimates are 10,000 a day.?Millennials are fast becoming the largest demographic in the workplace, and there aren’t nearly enough of them to fill the vacancies of exiting boomers. Therefore, leaders need to pay close attention to talent recruitment and retention because people matter, a lot. And our research revealed that teams of talented people have three characteristics that leaders must both find and encourage: ?Diversity, engagement and autonomy.

Diversity:?People are different, and different is good when it comes to teams solving critical problems and coming up with new solutions, products, and services. And while ethnic, gender, and cultural diversity are important to organizations that want to reflect their constituency, cognitive diversity is also very important to teams. Steve Jobs constantly told the folks at Apple to “think different!” When team members think differently, they approach problems from alternative cognitive points of view, and are collectively better able to solve complex problems.?

Engagement: Gallup’s extensive cognitive strengths-based research has demonstrated that engaged workers far outthink and outproduce disengaged ones. And while only 35% of all American workers are fully engaged, they outscored their disengaged colleagues in every credible productivity metric.?To keep people engaged, leaders must keep them interested in their work and encourage them to become excellent at it. Simply put, when people work toward their strengths rather than trying to “fix” weaknesses, they produce significantly better results. Connected directly to cognitive strengths are character strengths. And The VIA Survey of Character Strengths Survey—researched and developed at the University of Pennsylvania—has produced a reliable measure of what inspires others—their personal intrinsic values—much like Gallup’s StrengthsFinder helps accurately detect personal, cognitive strengths.?Such reliable instruments provide leaders and their teams with windows into how best to use their individual cognitive and character strengths to solve important problems. And when a leader helps people use their best thinking styles and character traits every day at work, those people become engaged and energized. Also, when all team members understand both the way they each think and their basic character strengths—often different from each other—understanding and synergy happens.

Autonomy: Talented people and teams appreciate and value when leaders give them autonomy—allow independent thinking. Unfortunately, vestiges of command-and-control leadership—anathema to autonomous thinking—still exist within too many leaders.?However, over the past two decades, coaching—an accelerator of autonomy—has emerged as an increasingly dominant leadership model. Certainly, the research by Google in Project Oxygen, Dan Goleman in Emotional Intelligence and others confirms the strength and effectiveness of the coaching model. By asking questions, leaders show respect, even give status to their direct reports. At the same time, coaching leads people to discover the answers to their own problems—the very definition of autonomy. The model that we’ve written about appears in Leading Well: Becoming a Mindful Leader-Coach. It follows the 4 Ps questioning model: 1. Problem: Ask questions to determine the real problem, not just the symptom; 2. Present: Ask about the size and status of the present state—the impact of what’s going on right now; 3. Possible: What’s the ideal possible future state; and, 4. Plan: What’s the first intentional step you can take toward this possible future ideal state.

See next week's newsletter when we discuss Critical Element #3: Culture.

Also, check out my new novel on Audible...