Loving Your Team

High-Performance Executive Newsletter: Uplevel your success and reduce stress.

New challenges drive growth, but old methods can drain time, energy, and relationships. Upgrade with my newsletter - packed with business, neuroscience, and psychology tools for lasting high performance.

The essentials: get calm (neuroregulation), clear negative self-talk and blocks, and build new success habits.

This week, we're looking at how to be a great boss.

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Loving Your Team

It can be a real joy to lead a high-energy, cooperative, excellent at their work, highly productive, and seamlessly integrated team. It’s easy to love a team like that!

It makes embodying a servant-leadership style, compassionate leadership, and many other culture-positive ideals much easier.

By contrast, when this does not describe your team, leading is harder. It’s more effort, frequently challenging, frustrating, and personally triggering. This kind of stress does not foster a happy leader, nor a happy, healthy team dynamic.

Plenty of leadership skills training is technical, even on the ‘soft skills’ side. You may have training in negotiation, interviewing, HR compliance, grievance procedures, delegation, and even listening skills. (If you’re lucky! The dearth of leadership training will be the rant, I mean subject, of another newsletter issue.)

Notice that these are all trainings for dealing with others, training in what to do.

We are definitely missing something!

Big Bad Boss?

In the UK, a significant number of employees express dissatisfaction with their managers:

·?????? Negative Workplace Culture: Approximately 33% of UK workers have left a job due to a negative workplace culture, often linked to poor management practices.

·?????? Workplace Conflict: A report by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) found that 25% of UK employees experienced workplace conflict in the past year, with common issues including being undermined or humiliated, often involving managerial staff.

?·?????? Employee Grievances: A survey indicated that nearly 30% of employers have observed an increase in employee grievances over a two-year period, with 54% of these grievances related to relationships with managers.

In the USA, 82% of workers have said they would quit if they had a? ‘bad manager’, and 71% of workers have experienced one.

And the cost? Check out your company’s employee turnover. It costs 10-20% of an employee's annual salary to recruit them and 30% or more for a senior leader.

The financial cost of poor team dynamics is huge. So it is not only harder to ‘love your team’ and hence lead them well with strained relationships, but it is also costly for the business.

What Gives?

Employees seem to be blaming ‘bad bosses’, but promotions don’t make people mean.

I’ve interviewed over 700 senior leaders and haven’t found bad intentions. Exactly the opposite.

The leaders want to be successful, lead well, and create a happy, healthy team dynamic. They want to love their work and love their team.

Nobody plans to be a bad boss!

The gap between these good intentions but often less-than-good implementation may be due to three internal factors on the part of the leader:

1. Difficulty managing stressful situations (reduced neuroregulation)

2. Taking criticism and conflict personally (reduced resilience)

3. Struggling to interact with ‘difficult’ team members (reduced ability to lead with compassion)

However, neuroregulation, resilience and compassionate leadership are not in typical leadership training. Why?

Because a strange, outdated view in the business world is still held that these are aspects of a person’s personality. The idea of ‘natural leader’, that you either have it or you don't.

It’s strange because in other areas of life, like sports, the better someone performs and succeeds, the more training and support they get. In the business world, it’s usually less (or even none) as you become more senior.

The reality is that neuroregulation, resilience, and compassionate leadership can absolutely be learned, and trained to become an automatic habit rather than an effortful exercise. This internal training then has a huge ripple effect creating more positive interaction and relationships.

Leader Transformation

So why isn’t everyone clamouring for such leader transformation programmes to develop that internal wellspring of calm and positive impact? Well, apart from the mistaken assumption these are personality traits, the other reason for resistance I typically hear, is that it feels too personal.

Many leaders feel it would be selfish to take a leadership transformation programme.

If paid for by the company, they think surely their team members should have that money spent on their skills development instead. If paying for themselves privately, then shouldn’t they be spending money on their family instead.

This kind of personal development vastly improves the quality of relationships with all stakeholders at work, with all family members at home, and with the greater community.

Leaders have a significant impact on the workplace and company culture, which means that every interaction would benefit from the leader’s transformational work.

Rather than being selfish to start a personal transformation programme for leaders, surely it would be selfish not to?

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What I’ve loved this week:

This week, I’ve had an epiphany! For the last 8 years I’ve been focused on eliminating imposter syndrome, and my programme, Inner Success, is 2-3X more effective than any other programme out there. (Yay!) The reason is that we resolve the root cause of imposter syndrome.

But as a coaching trainee pointed out, we’re not just solving imposter syndrome. Inner Success delivers a complete transformational programme, creating calm under pressure, effortless confidence, improved emotional intelligence, automatic compassionate leadership, mastery of people dynamics, clearing blocks to high performance, developing resilience and creating deep self-acceptance.

I knew all that, as I saw it in client results every day. But the reframe is startling. I’ve been underselling this programme for years!!

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An action step you can do this week …

Collect your company’s employee turnover and estimate what that has cost the company. This is a purely financial assessment, but it would be interesting to reflect on.

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I’ll explore tools for team dynamics and work culture in future issues too.

Do subscribe and share!

I’m Tara Halliday, creator of Inner Success, a one-to-one leadership transformation programme that promotes effortless confidence, unflappable calm, compassionate leadership, improved emotional intelligence, and resilient authenticity.

Message me or book a chat here:

Have an excellent, refreshing and recharging weekend and enjoy the holidays!

Tara

P.S. Thank you for reading to the end of the newsletter, I appreciate your interest and attention!

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