As a senior business leader, you think about whether you are getting the best from your managers and their teams. Is their performance good enough to achieve the longer-term strategic objectives facing the organization? How motivated are they to overcome gaps in delivery? Are they growing and thriving in ways that will give you a competitive edge? What ways can you motivate teams and keep your entire workforce energized to meet even more demands?
Investment in these two critical leadership skills may be the answer:
A highly motivated team is one that demonstrates collective commitment to its shared goals, is exceedingly productive and fundamentally self-managing. This level of performance is achieved by knowing how to help a team through its stages of development, and how to modulate your leadership style at each stage. One of the most popular models of team development is the Tuckman model and it describes these stages of forming, storming, norming and performing.
Teams can certainly energize the overall workforce, but so can individual contributors, and highly motivated individual contributors are great teammates. Teaching your top management talent how to bring out the best in people they hire is largely dependent on knowing how to develop individual talent through coaching and performance goals. And one of the things coaches do is motivate people to stretch beyond their comfort zones. In his book, “Courage Goes to Work”, Bill Treasurer talks about developing your staff by helping to fill their three buckets of courage:
Managers/coaches know how to jump first and be an example, create safety nets for first attempts, make room for stretch goals and adjust the degree of comfort or discomfort to nudge people in the right directions.
High-performing teams plus motivated individuals makes a great recipe for an energized workforce!