People leaders: rethink your approach to set your team up for success
The Behaviour Shift
Thought-leadership and insights about your people
Fortnightly Linkedin newsletter
The Behaviour Shift is a Linkedin exclusive newsletter packed with useful information and achievable behaviours to action, for HR Managers, People Leaders and Business Owners from a Melbourne based corporate coach, to create and nurture the best working environment for your people.
How you can maximise your teams’ potential
People Leaders and Business Owners, how do you currently set your team up for success?
Sales training?
Online courses and learning memberships?
Tickets to subject matter related events or industry conferences?
Skill-based training days?
I’d like to offer an alternative trail of thought to the classic belief that all you need to do is offer a good salary and the odd career development opportunity to keep your people happy and maximise the talent you have.
Can a training session be sufficient to set your team up for success?
Who loves an off-site training session and free lunch? 🙋 Meeeee!
Yeah…. Everybody does! How good are they?
Usually, they are off-site, lunch is provided, possibly different work attire… everyone is charged up. Then back to the office and the normal routine kicks back in, high performers with great mindset excel, others with a different mindset soon fall back to pretty much where they were like nothing happened.
Sounds familiar?
But, how about those yearly development plans?
Create business goals ✔️
Information on how you can best align those goals to company values ✔️
More training sessions (YES off-site lunch again!) ✔️
A “culture session” so people can call out their values ✔️
Then what?
Again… most people are focused and enthused for a while and then overloaded by the day-to-day, without the skills to properly manage priorities and tasks; nor the connection to the best version of themselves to keep them pushing on during challenging times.
How do you care for the individuals in your team?
Now, that’s the real conundrum that would really make a difference to whether or not you can set your team up for success. How do you apply strategies to a group of individuals hoping that they will work the same for everyone when everyone is different?
The answer is, you can’t!
Sorry, but if you are the owner of a business or a HR Manager and you think the way to great standards in your business is to run yet another sales-type training, coupled with the same development strategy you have been running for years then think again!
You have missed what’s been happening in the world when it comes to people pursuing their potential across all aspects of life.
Your people are demanding more of themselves and their employer now.
“You are who you are everywhere you go. So don’t expect someone that is struggling in aspects of life outside the hours of 9 to 5 to be all they could be when they put on their business game face, it’s just not a long term plan.” - Luke Fenwick
The elite of any industry or organisation have been doing this forever
Think about your CEO, Founder or Executive team, they didn’t get to these positions by gaining all their insights and expertise from just their own inner circle of one. They got outside support from mentors and a network of influence.
Getting to a certain level, business leaders are always looking to improve themselves and spend many hours and dollars on their own development.
Elite athletes don’t do it on their own. They seek support from various coaches to sharpen that razor's edge for when the lights burn bright.
Did you know that Tony Robbins charges his clients $1,000,000 for one single session with him and he has an 18 month waitlist? (wot?!)
“He has worked with four U.S. presidents, top entertainers – from Aerosmith to Green Day, Usher and Pitbull, and athletes and sports teams including tennis great Serena Williams, UFC champion Conor McGregor and the NBA’s Golden State Warriors. Business leaders and financial moguls from Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff to Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates have tapped him for personal coaching”.
Source: Tony Robbins’s biography
Not everyone’s an elite or top performer but why does this matter?
Because, if people who are already at the top of their game still feel like they can invest in themselves to pursue a higher level of potential…. Then why would someone yet to reach their peak, not do or need the same?
To set your team up for success, let your people do what they do best
When people are hired, they are usually (crazy thought coming) hired to perform the role they have expertise in.
Operations Manager looking after Operations.
Marketing Director… looking after Marketing.
Sales GM… looking after Sales.
But most of these titles also come with people, sometimes different teams.
Yet, we often ask and expect of these same people to prioritise setting their team up for success. We assume that, as part of their role, nurturing other individuals in their teams to be the best version of themselves will be a priority when in reality, their time and skills would be best placed focused on things that actually involve their job title.
You see where I’m getting to here?
Leadership is important within any organisation to set the tone and boost employee engagement. But it takes time to get granular and work towards maximising every single individual’s potential.
Some would argue that it’s not a skilled-based thing. You can be amazing and super efficient in your job as an Operations GM and have no people lifting or development skills to offer. My point is, good leadership, the one that is lifting people up to the best version of themselves, is often expected as a by-product of someone’s title and that’s why it often doesn’t work.
Instead, to set your team up for success (long term) how about finding someone else (actually qualified) who can do that?
Have you considered hiring a ‘human expert for potential’ in your organisation?
The human expert strategy explained
A man I admire, Dr Michael Gervais*, says:
“There are three things as humans we can train,” says Gervais. “We can train our craft, our bodies, and our minds.” “What we’ve learned from world-class athletes is that they train all three.”
* Michael Gervais is a high-performance psychologist working in high-stakes environments with some of the best in the world, training the mindset skills and practices essential to pursuing and revealing one’s potential.
He goes on to add “Microsoft has deployed this exercise to great effect: Over 30,000 people in Microsoft have gone through the training, articulated their personal philosophies to their peers, and most importantly, learned to trust each other.”
This actually happened way back in 2017 but their vision to support their team to work on the art of pursuing their best self, individually first, and his work with the executive team was fascinating to say the least.
Picture this, you can actually set your team up for success to be purposeful with thoughts and actions in each moment of the day at home and work.
Would that create a better culture in your business?
Would it create better results within your team?
Would that ultimately mean happier and healthier individuals? Hence, team?
Do you know what your people actually want?
PWC released a report in 2021 The Future of Work - What workers want - Winning the war for talent.
The report was compiled from the birth date of 1,800 workers across Australia:
5% Gen Z
36% Millennials
22% Baby Boomers
37% Gen X
It identified 7 areas in the preference index:
#1 ranked preference with 25% of the vote was “reward and remuneration”. Yes, people care about pay but it also includes lifestyle benefits.
#2 ranked preference with 22% was ”wellbeing”. That’s right 22% of employees value support of their wellbeing above all other factors.
#3 ranked preference with 16% was “experience”. Think about culture, team spirit and energy.
Below are the factors from the report relating to the wellbeing segment.
Mental health support
Wellness benefits such as gym membership
Lifestyle benefits
Work-life balance
Health and wellbeing
Financial support – through training and courses
You need to help individuals across 3 aspects of their lives
That’s right, going back to Michael Gervais’ theory, the 3 things humans can work on Mind, Body and Craft. Mind and Body are essential for your teams right now and when you add them all together, they probably outweigh just the paycheck if it’s in isolation.
You see, elite athletes know the importance of training mind, body and craft. Without the right mindset, you can’t set your team up for success and everything else falls short.
If you expect high-performing teams, it might be time you look to maximise each individual's potential.
For different results, dare to change your approach
I am a life coach and behaviour strategist. I combine my 20+ years of coaching people in the corporate world with what I learnt watching elite athletes and their coaches when I was working in professional sports. I help people hit the highest level they can so you could say this trend for employees to want more than just a paycheck is music to my ears.
I’m all about helping people pursue their true potential.
If you’ve never used a coach in your organisation up until now, here are my life coach tips and corporate coaching principles to maximise your teams’ potential:
Use the energy of your team on doing things that they excel at. If you have sales gurus, let them guru the heck out of sales. If helping people pursue their best selves is not their strong suit, then don’t burden them with that task.
Don’t just roll out a sales training IF your team isn't performing at a high level in all facets of life and bringing it each day. Remember humans work on three areas: craft + mind and body.
Don’t expect great results if your team is not fully engaged. Reflect on your own actions, when you felt amazing in all areas of life and focused on doing great things, how did that permeate into other areas? Like a powerful line up of dominos crashing into each other.
The best organisations are doing this right now and the best talent are demanding more from employers, we all have 24 hours in the day. How to be more purposeful, effective and efficient are the questions to be asked.
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