Attributes of a High Performing

Team

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2019 MIAList Team Judge

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ContentsIntroduction

Leading With Purpose: The Power Of Why

Overcoming Adversity: The Most Overlooked Leadership Skill?

Why Successful Leaders Encourage More Flexibility

Team Dynamics: Mastering The Different Communication Styles

What’s the Key To Overcoming The Damaging Silo Mentality?

Innovation: The Secret Ingredient Is Employee Engagement

Leadership: Inspire & Motivate With Meaningful Praise

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IntroductionIn this eBook we share our thoughts on the key attributes of high performing teams.

We recognise that every business, leader and team member have their own unique set of challenges. Through our client engagement programmes we have identified 7 key attributes of high performing teams and here we set out our insights into these attributes to ignite your curiosity.

What could your team achieve by applying them?

At Core Process we build energised, focused and agile teams that outperform the norm and deliver extraordinary results.

We work with leaders, individuals and teams offering 1:1 coaching, mentoring, consultancy and training programs.

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Leading With Purpose: The Power Of WhyEvery parent that has survived the terrible twos and gone through the ‘threenager’ stage will have experienced the testing phase of their child endlessly questioning their every decision. When we’re asked “Why?” for the seventh time in a row, it can be an easier option to reply “Because I said so!”.

Certain environments can exacerbate this, but growing up we can start to feel as though questioning things is bad and the more we climb the rungs of management and leadership, the more we seem to lose the ability to question the “Why” behind our decisions.

“Every instruction we give, every course of action we set, every result we desire, starts with the same thing: a decision.” – Simon Sinek

I’m yet to come across an inspirational or innovative business who have communicated to their teams that the business’s ‘purpose’ is to increase their year-on-year returns.

However, I have worked with many businesses that have vastly increased their returns year on year once their leaders were

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clear about and focused on their ‘purpose’.Don’t get me wrong, increasing returns and growing is vital! But your ‘purpose’ is even more important. So, let’s take a moment to clarify what a ‘purpose’ is:

It is a written statement that clearly communicates to your team what your company does and why it does it, which provides a structure for leaders to inspire their team to give their all.

This is why it’s so important for leaders to dig into what their purpose is, how it shapes the company and communicate this effectively to others.

Connecting Your Team To A Purpose

Doing things ‘on purpose’ is a hallmark of the most inspirational and successful leaders. These are the people who can lead their business with total clarity and an unwavering commitment, secure in the knowledge of not just what they’re doing, but why they’re doing it.

Once the purpose is clear, share it with your people. What you will then see is this purpose cascading down. The more conversations you have about purpose, the more you are co-creating it – it’s not my purpose or your purpose, it’s our purpose.

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This is powerful. It’s how you unleash the full potential of individuals.

If Your Purpose Isn’t Resonating

You need to look for ways you can create an environment where people can see how their work contributes to the bigger whole.

When employees have a firm sense of the unique contribution they make to others and embed this within their daily tasks, they become more engaged and more productive.

One easy way of doing this is regularly sharing updates on the impact of their daily choices and activities and why they matter. Hearing a five-minute story about how your hard work benefits others’ can be a powerful motivator – it gives meaning to their work.

“Hard work is a prison cell only if the work has no meaning.” – Malcolm Gladwell

People are most willing to give their hearts and energy to something they connect with at a deep, emotional level.

So, ask them to reflect on why they do their work, what strengths they use and what energises them. When you know this, you can line up their personal purpose with the shared purpose of the business and relate what staff are doing on a daily basis to a bigger shared purpose.

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader” – John Quincy Adams

The more ingrained your purpose is, the more people will connect with it. Just stating a purpose yields no financial return or improved performance. It’s only when the purpose is clear

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and present in everyday work life can it make a difference – even if this means postponing momentary happiness in favour of delayed results.

Drifting without a defined purpose

Skills, roles, working/learning style and experience all contribute to who you are as a leader.

Having this knowledge about yourself can help you avoid drifting away from your purpose when you are met by new challenges.

And it’s the same for your team:

‘When connected as a tribe as a team they will thrive – that connection is powerful when it is made through a strong purpose.’ – Stefan Wissenbach

If you can’t make conscious choices about why, when, how and where you lead, you will lack the ability to be clear about how these choices help you and your team move the needle towards achieving a goal that is shared by everyone.

Leading with an awareness of a purpose will give you clarity, focus, and the confidence to act, especially in the unknown, in-line with your purpose and enhance your impact as a leader.

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Spot The Gaps

When leaders begin to lead more consciously in line with a purpose, they immediately begin to see the places where it’s missing and this becomes an opportunity to close the gap.

This is how you thrive where others simply survive.

Effects of leading with purpose on your bottom lineYou’re running a business so we have to end with how leading with purpose benefits your bottom line:

It’s no secret that leaders and employees who are engaged are more productive, stay for longer and take far fewer sick days. All of which directly impact your bottom line.

“People who love going to work are more productive and more creative. They go home happier and have happier families. They treat their colleagues and clients and customers better.” – Simon Sinek

But instead of asking how this affects your bottom line, ask why should your people follow you? Why should they stick around? And why should they consistently give their all?

Because you’re their boss? If that’s your attitude, you’ll get the basic work ethic it inspires. You certainly won’t be inspiring them

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to give discretionary effort (the level of effort people could give if they wanted to).

Businesses that are leading with purpose are winningIn today’s crowded marketplace, businesses that are purpose-driven are winning.

If you start leading with purpose, you’ll soon see a change in everyone around you:

“With a little discipline, any leader or organisation can inspire others, both inside and outside their organisation. We can all learn to lead.” – Simon Sinek

In our leadership training, we focus on enabling leaders to dramatically increase momentum in their companies for game-changing results. Let’s not be outdone by the ‘Threenagers’

If you are struggling to define your purpose and communicate it effectively, or having trouble with employee engagement and finding it hard to attract/retain top talent then we can help:

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Overcoming Adversity: The Most Overlooked Leadership Skill?Nobody can elude adversity forever. Life will never be a bed of roses. It will eventually throw unpleasant surprises and challenges your way.

However, the more emotionally resilient you are, the more constructively and effectively you can respond to – and overcome – adversity. Having this resilience, this ability to handle adversity is the most overlooked trait of every successful leader.

It has significant value in every industry and should not be underestimated.

Unfortunately, most leaders are generally not trained to effectively handle stressful interactions.

What Do We Mean By Adversity

People often confuse setbacks with adversity. But unlike setbacks, which are single events, adversity can last a long time and encompass many events and changes in circumstances.

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This is why adversity, if not handled properly, can stop a business from moving forward (and even throw it into reverse). This is why it’s a fundamental skill for leaders (and staff too).

The ability to overcome adversity is a good predictor of leadership success.

Not Getting Overwhelmed By Adversity

The real measure of a leader comes when things aren’t going well – when the going gets tough.

However, you typically have 3 different kinds of leaders who each react to adversity in different ways. For this, consider the challenge of climbing a mountain:

• One will get to the base of the mountain, look up, and say, “I can’t climb that” and quit.

• One makes it about half-way, declares it a success and stops.

• One can’t stop striving for the top of the mountain, no matter what it takes.

The first type of leader quickly gets overwhelmed. They can’t see a route up the mountain. These leaders can’t react to adversity productively. No great leader has ever had this mindset.

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Which kind of leader do you resonate with when you’re faced with challenges?

Having the right mindset as a leader is vital because how you handle the curve balls is how you demonstrate your leadership credentials. If you fall apart when things don’t go smoothly, you’ll have less credibility as a leader in the future.

So, what separates the 3 types of leaders?

Being Adaptable

The 3rd leader accepts whatever adversity comes their way. Rather than worry and anticipate the worst, they always look for the best ways in which they can move forward.

To become the 3rd leader, you need Self-Awareness – an Ei competency – as it requires taking an honest look at yourself. You have to recognise your innate response to adversity to be able to adapt or react effectively.

This is because adversity sometimes requires a slightly different approach. This is where the first leader trips up – they are reluctant to try something new because of the fear of failing and looking incompetent. However, part of overcoming adversity is about our response to our emotions – in this case, fear.

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Leaders with emotional intelligence recognise this and control their emotions before they influence their actions – they show more emotional stability when faced with challenges.

In other words, how we choose to think, feel, and act in relation to challenges can often make the difference between hope versus despair, optimism versus frustration, and giving up versus dealing with issues.

Seeing The Long Game

A big part of overcoming adversity is seeing the long game – postponing momentary happiness in favour of delayed results. This is where leaders with emotional intelligence excel.

Their emotional stability allows them to persevere towards goals despite increasing adversity.

Avoiding Discouragement

To overcome adversity leaders need to avoid letting setbacks from demoralising them.

“Abraham Lincoln lost eight elections, failed twice in business and suffered a nervous breakdown before he became the president of the United States.” — Wall Street Journal

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I understand when things go wrong, it can be easy to start feeling as if there’s no point to your work. But you have to catch yourself before you let adversity affect your decision making – this is where your Self-Awareness plays a decisive role.

Not doing so can be disastrous. Employees follow the example of their leader so when a leader gets visibly discouraged, their attitude can quickly spread to others.

And when a business becomes infected with this mindset, it becomes much harder to put up with everyday problems and frustrations – and see the small successes.

Of course, you have to be realistic and recognise the times where you’re chasing a lost cause, but in general, a leader who is easily discouraged is a poor leader.

Final Thoughts

Challenges and difficulties are guaranteed experiences in life and business but your ability to overcome this adversity is the number-one factor in determining success.

Taking an honest perspective about how you react to adversity – and accepting this – allows for opportunities for change and innovation.

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Why Successful Leaders Encourage More FlexibilityEach and every one of your employees will have different ways of structuring the way they work. And that’s ok. Not everyone will have the same needs.

It is so important to recognise these needs and then to carve out time to allow them to satisfy these needs. We work at our best when we are happy and fulfilled.

The troubles come when they get locked into a pattern of working, refuse to budge and the overall objectives of the business become secondary to personal goals.

Employees might feel (often correctly) they are great at what they do and so their way of working is the best way to approach a new problem.

However, different tasks require different behaviours. Approaching them with the same style of behaving can put you at a severe disadvantage.

In our training sessions, we use the analogy of each of us having a tool belt that can hold different strengths and styles of behaving. The key is being able to recognise and access the right ‘tool’ for the situation or task.

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The more adept a person is at recognising what behaviours and strengths they need to pick from their toolbelt for a particular task or project will determine how easy it is and how willing they are to temporarily adapt styles and perform at their best.

A better analogy might be to think in terms of vehicles. You wouldn’t take a landrover around the track at Silverstone on race day nor would you take a supercar off-roading. You need to switch vehicles to suit the conditions.

Thinking this way will also help when someone finds a new task is taking them away from what motivates them (working how they want to). They may approach the task resentful that it is taking them away from what makes them successful and send them off into a downward spiral with a lack of enthusiasm for the job at hand.

Why don’t employees adapt?

Individuals may have learned (maybe even over years) to approach tasks with a specific mindset, and asking them to branch out may be outside of their realm of experience.

Their inflexibility can stem from a fear of making a mistake and looking incompetent or simply that they have never taken the time to reflect on past projects and ask themselves if how they approached it was the most effective way.

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As a Manager do you encourage reflection time – i.e. getting staff to think what worked, what didn’t and what could have been approached differently.

Granted, there are some places where rigid is better than flexible – e.g. where employees have to follow legal procedures, or in operations or logistics – but rigid thinkers can sap the enthusiasm out of teams by unintentionally dismissing ideas, lessening the contribution others can make and leaving co-workers feeling hamstrung in their jobs.

You probably see this a lot when you ask people to team up to tackle a project. Typically, it occurs between people with the ‘get up and go’ and the ‘sit down and plan’ mentalities.

Regardless of the root cause of an employees’ rigidity, successful leaders will be able to inspire more flexibility if you account for how employees tend to structure their work and by showing employees that they have a choice of how they choose to think, feel and act.

This is how you can encourage your people to see and asses problems from different perspectives – i.e. picking the right tool from their toolbelt.

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How to ease people into being more adaptable

Make sure everyone sees the bigger picture. When people focus on the efficiency of their part of the process, they often don’t weigh the impact of their actions on other team members or even customers – the ‘my work finishes at the end of my desk’ mentality.

To improve teamwork, ensure everyone understands how their work fits together to achieve a shared goal.

And if contrasting behavioural styles are causing friction, ask them to consider stepping back and looking at what is driving that behaviour. Often by taking the time to consider other’s actions, and by talking to them, we understand that we are all working towards the same end goal but simply approaching it with a different set of tools.

Encourage teams to identify the ‘tools’ they need for a specific task or project and discuss why having that ‘tool’ in the toolbelt is important to them. Just because you’re clashing over working style, it is not necessarily about you; it could be that it is just their preference and style of working. They firmly believe their way is right because their life experiences have shaped them to think that way, just like yours have shaped you.

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Is this a learnable skill?

Knowing which behaviour or strength to deploy at which time isn’t an innate skill people are born with. It’s something we develop and learn throughout our lives.

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Team Dynamics: Mastering The Different Communication StylesCommunicating clearly is a core leadership skill. This could be considered a bold statement but being able to adapt communication styles is what separates a poor leader from an exceptional one.

Every team has unique goals, challenges and values – and unique communication dynamics – meaning reacting to situations without filtering your responses can jeopardise relationships with employees, sap their motivation and fuel resentment.

Communication. It’s the foundation of any successful team – business or otherwise.

Motivating individuals, making work meaningful and reducing conflict

Differences between communication styles is one of the biggest causes of frustration and conflict in the workplace, but the solution isn’t filling your team with carbon copies of yourself. You need a diverse team

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And while navigating interpersonal dynamics can feel like extra work, communicating with employees in a way that resonates is a great way to build trust.

It’s a way of showing you see them for who they are, value their contributions and have their back.

And guess what, they’ll likely have your back, too.

But to communicate in a way that will motivate, make work meaningful and reduce conflict, you need to understand the different communication styles and how best to approach employees who value different things.

People will typically fall into one of 4 styles based on their core values. I’m going to call these:

The Helper | The Thinker | The Go-Getter | The Whatever It Takes

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The Helper

The Helper can be friendly and always willing to help others succeed. They thrive on interpersonal relationships (which makes them great collaborators) and take value from being helpful. For them…

Try:

• Approaching them in a casual, warm and friendly manner• Demonstrating to them how they can be of help to you in

writing, for them to refer back to after a verbal conversation

Avoid:

• Talking down to them or being blunt• Trying to stifle general conversations or their freedom to

express emotions• Expecting them to dive into the details

The Thinker

The Thinker can be cautious, systematic and analytical. They probably won’t chat you up about weekend plans, but they’re the person you want for assessing risks or when you need to conduct research. For them…

Try to…

• Provide as much as possible detail up front, organised as methodically as you can

• Set clear expectations but give them the time and space to work independently

• Expect them to check all the info and options before making a decision

Avoid…

• Leading with emotion – use words like “know” or “think” instead of “feel”

• Expecting them to ease into chit-chat• Rushing them into a decision

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The Go-Getter

The Go-Getter’s can be the people who prefer shooting from the hip, focused on results. For them…

Try to:

• Get right to the point, and stay on-topic• Be prepared to answer follow-up questions on the spot –

this will help you answer with confidence• Expect them to be decisive, sometimes blunt or to the point

Avoid:

• Taking their bluntness, follow-up questions and impatience personally.

• Making promises you can’t stick to• Putting in too many processes / steps that they might see as

preventing them from reaching the goal

The Whatever It Takes

It should be fairly clear which type your people fall into, however, some can be more ‘fluid’ in their style of working they take cues from what is going on around them. They might adjust their style to do ‘Whatever It Takes’ to get things done.A few things to keep in mind when communicating with Whatever It Takes types:

Try to…

• Practice active listening, encourage interaction• Demonstrate why you value them on your team• Be prepared to give extra information

Avoid…

• Asking them to work independently, or in isolation• Failing to live up to your commitments

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Which one are you?

Which one do you think you are? And, more importantly, which one do you think your employees resonate with?

Of course, these are the extremes and while people will often take cues from each style, if you can recognise where they typically ‘fit’ and thrive you can be prepared to adapt and match your communication to suit the needs of each employee.

Now that you know a little about the different communication styles, think back to some of the stressful interactions you’ve had at work when you weren’t the boss. You’ll probably realise most were caused in part by a mismatch in those styles – and the same is true for your team.

Continue To Improve Your Team Dynamics

This blog is part of our ongoing ‘Team Dynamics’ series that will continue to help you improve communication, boost motivation and keep levels of employee engagement at a maximum. The next blog in this series will be: ‘Inspire & Motivate With Meaningful Praise’, so make sure you look out for that.

However, if you want to take a deeper dive into understanding your team’s dynamic, our training sessions will give you the insights and skills that will enable you to communicate more effectively, drive engagement and maximise the performance of your team.

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What’s The Key To Overcoming The Damaging Silo Mentality?Open communication is a key part of any business. When teams communicate effectively, they feel a sense of unity. They are driven towards a common goal by a commitment to succeed.

However, many businesses fall into the trap of letting silos form amongst their workforce.

Silos are what we refer to when we see poor communication and a sense of disconnection between departments. This has a detrimental effect on your team dynamics because it ends up resulting in a poor transfer of knowledge and information.

And that severely impacts performance.

In fact, few things corrode a company’s performance more than a silo mentality because when teams/individuals operate on different pages their own personal motivations take precedence. This prevents them from seeing the big picture and reaching long-term goals.

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Picture a team of people without a common belief, driven by separate agendas and leaders battling their egos. Typically, this exposes base emotions of selfishness and insecurity which makes for a risk-averse, dysfunctional business.

It’s vital as a business or team of people that you tackle this head-on.

How can you protect your business against this dysfunctional, losing mindset?

You need two vital dimensions to be dealt with simultaneously:

• Create an inspiring purpose and supporting values to align the Teams & Leaders.

• Build a stronger and more agile emotional bandwidth in leaders and Teams.

Once these dimensions have a framework for teams to engage with, business processes can be overlaid and streamlined to guide smarter, faster and better outcomes.

Create an inspiring purpose.

We’ve worked with countless businesses and it’s surprising how often the ‘big picture’ is left murky, unclear, or worse, unspoken because individual goals connected to a shared inspiring purpose drives engagement.

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And employee engagement is the key to overcoming the silo mentality because engaged employees are connected to a larger purpose that shapes their decision making.

When it’s clear people aren’t just working towards their own goals—the ‘my work finishes at the end of my desk’ mentality—trust skyrockets, the barriers come down and fractured teams can begin to use collaborative thinking and processes to achieve goals in a smarter, faster and better way.

Unengaged teams, on the other hand, don’t trust each other. And without trust behaviours will develop into a silo mentality. This will always be a losing team.

Build a stronger, more agile emotional bandwidth in leaders and teams

You’ll find that many people (at all levels) will have little to no response when you ask them what their business’ purpose is. This results in employees focusing on more selfish goals. It works for them and they feel like they are valuable.

But this limited way of thinking allows silos to form.

Eventually people become insecure about looking incompetent and so intentionally don’t involve others—causing the chasm between teams to widen further.

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To overcome this silo mentality you need to build a stronger, more agile emotional bandwidth in leaders and teams.

Self-awareness, empathy, stress tolerance and problem-solving all contribute to confidence and are all skills people with higher emotional intelligence can tap into to help reduce insecurities around decision making (within their role) and any doubts about their role contribution.

What’s Your Purpose?

Sure, aligning departments isn’t always as simple as it sounds—priorities and processes may clash—but not working towards a common purpose divides people and teams at all levels.

Establishing your purpose gives teams a compass when they question ‘Why are we doing this?’ and is how you can make strides in eliminating the damaging silo mentality. It also fuels engagement. And that’s no small endeavour.

Having engaged, focused talent is an important asset that will help you thrive—even in uncertain economic times—because they show more agility based on the principles of employee empowerment and transparency.

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Innovation: The Secret Ingredient Is Employee EngagementThe inspiration for the post came from someone I recently met who said that their business had been left behind by their competition as they had not changed with the times. They explained the philosophy of the employees was ‘We have always done it this way – why change?’

They needed to innovate.

What Innovation Actually Means

Before we dive into innovation, we have to clear up the often ambiguous, intimidating definition of what it means to innovate.

When you think ‘innovation’ does your mind go straight to designing world-altering technology? Be honest now.

When people think of innovation, they too often think ideas have to be a radical sci-fi sounding invention which will help solve global warming in the next 10 years. But really, innovation can be big or small.

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It might only be an idea that shaves 5 minutes off your existing processes, but by the end of the year that five minutes a day idea has saved nearly a weeks worth of hours.

Imagine how many five-minutes-a-day ideas your team might be sitting on.

Who Is Responsible For Innovation?

When you label innovation as dreaming up new products or tech, it can be daunting.

But when employees at all levels understand innovation can be as simple as improving internal processes, streamlining workflows or automating repetitive tasks, innovation can happen in any department, by any employee, in any industry – regardless of company size.

In other words, innovation isn’t tied to one group, department or job (read: managers); everyone can make a difference if they have a voice.

You may find some hidden nuggets of knowledge gold at the heart of your company.

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Why Innovation Sometimes Doesn’t Happen Naturally

Fear of failure

Even if your team came up with a breakthrough idea, would they be confident bringing it up? What if it goes against the status quo?

Probably not.

The fear of failure is one of the most common barriers to innovation. Someone might have a great idea but their concern about looking incompetent may keep them from taking the risk or challenging traditional strategies.

Not Engaged

I can’t think of a single example of when a disengaged, unmotivated group delivered a breakthrough. Can you?

That’s because a disengaged workforce won’t innovate:

A study by Krueger & Killham (2007) found that 59% of engaged employees say that their job ‘brings out their most creative ideas’.

Tellingly, only 3% of the disengaged employees said the same.

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When employees are disengaged, you’ll quickly notice a decline in the quality of their work, a lack of desire to learn and an overall drop-off in effort.

To Innovate You Have To Engage

There is a direct correlation between organisations that have more engaged employees and those that are more innovative.

Innovation and engagement are intrinsically linked.

To build an employee base that is more instinctively inclined toward innovation, you have to create an environment where employees are excited and enthusiastic to work.

You do align this by understanding what makes each employee tick and how best to challenge their unique strengths. This is how you make people feel like they are making a difference and that they are valued, and damn is that engaging.

Employees feel challenged, engaged and valued when their tasks are aligned with their own purpose and strengths.

And when they know their skills are valued, it gives them the confidence to pursue their ideas without that fear of failure hanging over them. They will begin to approach problems through an innovative lens.

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Don’t Be The Next Blockbuster

Engaged leaders embrace change and look for innovative ways to disrupt the norm.

You probably know the story about how Blockbuster refused an option to buy Netflix – who later put them out of business. All too often, leaders become protective of what they’ve created and fail to engage their employees to help them innovate.

Meeting the needs of a diverse, multi-generational workforce isn’t easy, but when your people grow, your business grows too – don’t be the next Blockbuster.

I will leave with this question: Do you do things the same old way?

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Leadership: Inspire & Motivate With Meaningful PraiseEveryone sometimes feels overworked and frustrated, but if you can make your team feel appreciated, it’ll go a long way to keeping morale and engagement high. This is where praise comes in.

However, meaningful praise should be more than a generic “Good job.” Or, more accurately, it can be more.

Skilled managers adapt praise so that it really hits home and makes each employee feel genuinely appreciated. They do this by tapping into what makes that person tick, how they structure their work and what they value.

For example, some team members will value hearing how helpful their research was. Some will love hearing how you couldn’t have achieved the goal without them. And others will take joy from hearing how helpful they’ve been on a project.

If you offer praise about how helpful their research is to someone who prioritises achieving goals, it’s not going to resonate with their core values. Sure it’s still praise, but you can make it mean so much more:

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“Hey, Jenny! We couldn’t have gotten the X Project over the line without you. Great job!”

Whereas this style may be appreciated more by Liam whose preference is to focus on the detail and processes.

“Hey, Liam! Without your insights, we would have lost the X Project! Great job!”

Consider How You Deliver Praise

It is also important to consider how you deliver praise. Some prefer a public pat on the back, while others want to be thanked privately. Some want a brief compliment because they are easily embarrassed, while others love getting a letter as it shows you have taken the time to think about it.

There’s nothing more powerful than communicating in a way that truly resonates with your employees. It shows you sincerely value their contribution, understand them. It motivates them to continue giving their all.

How do know which ‘style’ people prefer?

You should be able to tell by now that there are plenty of ways to enrich communication, but to make any actionable improvements – like the ones above – you need to understand what motivates each employee.

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Don’t just talk and walk away. You need to listen. Listening should be the most used form of communication for every leader. While there’s no ideal ratio of listening to speaking, the scale should tip slightly in favour of listening.

Now, when we say ‘listen’ we mean listen to what your team is explicitly saying, as well as what they’re not saying.

Take note of when people are particularly energised and motivated – this is a good sign that their tasks align with their personal values. On the flip side of this, take note of when people dig in their heels and seem frustrated.

When you’re truly ‘hearing’ what your employees are telling you, you’ll have all the information you need to not only offer meaningful praise but also to communicate in the most effective way.

It can take time to understand your team, which is why we run workshops to get you up to speed with what motivates your team faster. Learn how you and your team prefer to communicate and use this to improve workplace relationships and your overall team dynamics.

Help Your Team Reach Peak Performance

As a leader, one of the most critical skills you need to develop is the ability to adapt your communication style based on who you’re talking to. When you’re able to use the right style at the right time, you’re able to help your team reach peak performance.

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