Inspiring Your Team

by David Marsh | Jul 12, 2024 | Business | 0 comments

s to make surenIIf you answer ‘no,’ A great piece of work from Keith Murray (CMI) looks at the eight ways bad managers kills conversations – and motivation.

When you look at the eight areas below, ask yourself to things; Do I do some of these things and do you someone that does?

1/ … are secretive and share as little information as possible – to them, information is power, so they deliberately choose to withhold it
2/ … are bad at giving feedback
3/ … are even worse at giving praise than giving feedback (employees always see managers who give praise as more effective)
4/ … are rampant one-way communicators who are on the ‘broadcast’ button all the time and have no interest in listening to people’s views or encouraging robust conversations to find ideal solutions. They care little about encouraging good communication between team members
5/ … are invisible, and prefer the security of their office walls to going out to talk to members of their team. They send emails at all hours of the day and night, even if members of their team are but yards away in the office
6/ … never prepare for presentations, preferring to speak off the cuff
7/ … have no sense of their audience and are completely unaware of the audience’s issues and concerns – they have a message to deliver and, by heck, deliver it they will, no matter how long it takes
8/ … are ambiguous, indirect or even lie, and never check whether people have understood a single word they said, and often use the phrase ‘you are not listening!’

Okay. Do you recongise any of these behaviours from yourself? If your answer is ‘no’ it’s worth asking for some honest peer feedback to make sure. If you feel the eight areas as a personal attack on the way you manage, it is likely you do give out some of these vibes to your team. May be hard to take, but worth taking onboard.

Who of us would want to be working in a team led by a boss who exhibits any of the behaviours I have listed above?

These are toxic bosses, and they create dreadful cultures and poisonous places of work that are harmful to our health, and our ability to contribute meaningfully to our organisation. These are the bosses who will have high churn rates in their teams, with most of their employees looking to move to another department or even another company.

Happily, well-intended managers who truly want to improve their performance can address most of these bad behaviours. Being mindful of these destructive behaviours is a good place to start.

According to CMI research, as many as four out of five managers in the UK are accidental managers – those promoted to their role without adequate training. In the UK alone, that’s an estimated 2.4 million bosses. Imagine how many employees that affects? According to one estimate, less than half of all employees are satisfied with their manager. How many of them are feeling disengaged and demotivated? This brings with it a massive cost in lost productivity

If you are successful in inspiring your team to work in the right direction, then you can get the very best from them no matter what else is going on.

If they believe in your vision, they will be absolutely loyal and committed to what you’re doing.

Your team will be more focused and drive your business, department, or startup forward faster than anything else.

Notice the word ‘vision’ here.

That’s very important and we’ll come to why in a moment.

What’s more, is that if you have a vision for your team, you’ll help to inspire others.

That means your customers and your potential business partners.

More people will want to work with you. More people will want to buy from you. More people will want to be loyal to your brand and to think of themselves as a ‘part’ of what you do. It goes deeper too.

That’s because having a vision can also help you to make the right decisions for your organisation.

The importance of not just keeping your team afloat but of growing and avoiding catastrophe.

That all comes from having the right vision.

Your vision is what gives you your goals.

And if you get it right, it should also be what gives you your drive to succeed and makes that passion contagious. Many of the points we coach stem from that vision.

THE GOLDEN CIRCLE

Introducing: The Golden Circle Perhaps the best way to illustrate what is meant by vision, is to look at a concept in business known as the ‘golden circle’.

What is the golden circle?

Well, if you believe the highly popular TED talk by Simon Sinek (who first proposed the concept), the golden circle is the difference between innovating companies that grow and thrive and those companies that fail.

Why is it that Apple is constantly creating more exciting products?

Why is it that the Wright Brothers’ succeeded where others failed, others who had more resources and more means?

The answer is the golden circle.

The golden circle is made of three ‘rings’ which can be seen as layers.

On the outermost ring, you have the word ‘What’.

Inside that, you have the word ‘How’.

And on the innermost ring, is the word ‘Why’.

So as a leader, you need to think about these three things:

• What? • How? • Why?

For the sake of simplicity, we will start by focusing on this question from a business perspective. That means we can change these questions into:

• What do you do?

• How do you do it?

• Why do you do it?

Ikea

At IKEA, our vision is to create a better everyday life for the many people. Our business idea supports this vision by offering a wide range of well- designed functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them.

Amazon

It is our goal to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online.

Coca-Cola

To refresh the world in mind, body and spirit. To inspire moments of optimism and happiness through our brands and actions. To create value and make a difference.

Facebook

Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. That reflects that we can’t do this ourselves, but only by empowering people to build communities and bring people together. Our lives are all connected.

Google

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Intel

Delight our customers, employees, and shareholders by relentlessly delivering the platform and technology advancements that become essential to the way we work and live.

McDonald’s

McDonald’s brand mission is to be our customers’ favourite place and way to eat and drink.

Microsoft

Our mission is to enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential. This is important because it is what makes the brand something that the audience, the employees and the leaders themselves can believe in – and it is what sets the long-term course for the journey. And as Simon Sinek puts it: people don’t buy what you do, people buy why you do it.

The objective is not to sell to people who need what you make, the objective is to sell to people who believe in what you believe. Those are the people who will be loyal to your brand. And the same goes for employees. Employees who believe in your mission statement will stay up late at night working because they believe in what they do – they’re excited by it and they want to see it happen. People on Kickstarter will even pay to see your mission statement become a reality even when there’s nothing in it for them.

Oculus’ mission statement is to: deliver incredible, affordable, and ubiquitous consumer virtual reality to the world. This is a mission that people believed in so strongly, that they essentially funded the organisation and allowed it to become a real-life company.

A good business starts with that vision and then builds outward from there – everything from the branding, to the marketing, to the products themselves should align with that eventual end goal.

And when you’re excited about your goals, it will be infectious. When you’re excited about where your business is going, it will come across in the way you gesticulate, the way you talk, and the way you lead.

You can watch Simon Sinek’s Ted Talk here: Watch Video

Best wishes

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