Stop Overloading Your Team

The best leaders can?empathize, understand, and share feelings with their team members. Influential leaders live by strong values that guide their decisions and behaviors. They know right from wrong, are honest in their interactions with others, and practice ethical leadership and integrity.

Business owners and CEOs, myself included, often get in our way. We need to learn to lead by example. We must listen to understand, not respond. And we need to trust our teams and sell them our vision without overloading them.

Are We Crazy?

Most CEOs and business owners are a little crazy. But, of course, we’re supposed to be. Otherwise, how would we devote an extreme amount of time and effort to our organizations?

I feel that our other executive-level team members may wish to give us a few words of advice without fear of repercussions.?Here’s what our high-level team members want to say to us.?

Please stop coming to work every day!

They need a break from us. But they also need us to connect with them when it matters.

The Conference-to-Brain-Dump Pipeline

When we step away from our companies and attend conventions, conferences, and mastermind events, we reemerge with new ideas and methods. Although gaining new knowledge can benefit our companies exponentially in the long run, how we return to work with new knowledge can be challenging in the workplace and piss off others.

We come back elated and energized by new principles that we want to implement. But then, we dump these grand plans on our team and expect them to be excited, too. Although they may love the ideas, our team members can’t be expected to drop everything and get started on them right away. Instead, they want to take all of our ideas, put them in a little box, organize the box, and vote on putting them into action once a month.

When you dump a bunch of crazy ideas and tasks on your team and expect them to make everything happen immediately, they get confused and overwhelmed and most of all pissed off. As a result, you’ll not get the desired results. It’s not because your ideas are terrible. It’s because the execution is wrong.

Characteristics of an effective leader

You and your team are only as strong as your foundation. When your foundation begins to crack under the stress of being overloaded, the walls will eventually crumble to the ground.

Although there isn’t a single right way to effectively lead a team, there are several common characteristics among successful leaders and managers that you should consider when developing your leadership skills.

Ineffective leadership can cost companies more than just morale. According to research from?Gallup, 34 percent of employees are actively disengaged due to poor management, leading to less productive, less profitable teams and more likely to cause a turnover. And that turnover adds up quickly: translating into nearly two times the annual salary of every employee who quits.

That’s why effective leadership is so important. To retain employees, satisfy customers, and improve company productivity, you need people who can effectively communicate the company’s vision, guide teams, and influence change.

1. Ability to Influence Others

2. Transparency - to an Extent

3. Encourage Risk - Taking and Innovation

4. Value Ethics and Integrity

5. Act Decisively

6. Balance Hard Truths with Optimism

Becoming an effective leader doesn’t happen overnight. It’s an iterative process and requires you to assess your strengths and evaluate who you are as a communicator and collaborator.

Influencing others requires building trust with your colleagues. Focus on understanding their motivations and encourage them to share their opinions. You can then use that knowledge to make a change and show that their voice matters.

The Importance of Time and Vision

The other key issue at hand is time. Too often, we tell our people what to do and expect them to get it done without understanding the “why.” Our team members do need – and deserve – to understand the why.

When your team members understand the vision, they will become as passionate about your ideas as you are. Of course, you can’t expect them to rally the troops if you are barking orders that only you understand. But, if your team has a vision of the end product or desired result, they will hop aboard happily if they understand why you are steering the ship in that direction.

Our executive team members often tell us they need more time with us. We say we’re busy, or they don’t need us to walk them through whatever they have asked of us. We are guilty of saying, “Trust us,” without building that trust in the first place.

The truth is that our executives do need our time. We have an opportunity to help them grow into the best team members possible, and we can’t do that without that one-on-one time. If we let our executives into our thought processes and help them understand the vision for new initiatives, we’ll be golden. They will give their whole professional selves to the mission. They will make our dreams a reality.

So, the next time an exec asks you for a one-on-one to discuss a new project, CEOs and business owners take the damn meeting. You owe it to your team, and you owe it to yourself.