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Design For Ease of Use with Lean CX – Leadership Card 13
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Focus on Your Team’s Strengths
Have you ever been around someone who can only see the negative side of life? If there’s a rainbow, they focus on the rain. If they are somewhere, they’d rather be somewhere else. Nothing is ever good enough. It’s depressing, isn’t it? Well the latest research shows it’s depressing for your team as well, and it actually reduces their engagement, their productivity and your profit.
We already know that checking in with your team regularly is important, and just doing that can increase team engagement and help keep your results on track. But what Gallup Inc. also found when performing the study was that leaders who focus on their team’s strengths saw up to 22% higher engagement than their counterparts who focused only on their team’s negatives.
And it makes sense, doesn’t it? Nobody likes a wet blanket. But also, while showing someone what not to do can be effective and has its merits, just hearing where you’re going wrong all the time wears thin pretty quickly. So thin, in fact, that engagement and productivity go down. And the fact is that unhappy people don’t do that great of a job.
This Is All a Part of Leading Well
Many people don’t have a playbook when they first become leaders. So checking in regularly by itself can make a huge difference because you know your team, what they are up to, where they are struggling and what they enjoy. And that is the real key to this Leadership Card – when we talk to our team members and they reveal what they are good at, what flows naturally for them, what they find easy and what they enjoy, we can find a way to weave that into their tasks or the way they perform their tasks.
Do they enjoy speaking with people? Find a way to put more stakeholder tasks, customer tasks, or running meetings into their work and go from there. Or maybe they prefer working with data? Can they manage a spreadsheet of their tasks or results, or do the same for their team, department or company? How about sales figures or customer drop off points on a website?
The point is, even in a team that performs similar tasks you will find people with different strengths. And you don’t usually get to find out what those strengths are to make the most of them, without actually checking in with your team.
Focusing on your team’s strengths isn’t as hard as some might think, and the rewards you will see will absolutely change your life and work for the better.
Chat soon – David McLachlan
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