The essentials for engaging your teams

Do you need to lead a team? Or are there people in your team who need to learn how to lead their own teams?

Leadership and management — engaging your team — is a skill that CAN be learned. I learned it myself. It was hard, but I did it.

Here is what helped me:

1. First, establish your weekly meeting

Your weekly team meeting is the anchor of your team’s engagement. It is the place where you model behaviour, monitor actions, and ensure clarity.

Having a weekly meeting in place means you have a rhythm for the primary conversations of your team:

• Purpose. Why are we doing this?
• Plan. What are we doing?
• Progress. How are we doing?

2. Next, develop your clear purpose and set of goals

Once you have your weekly meeting in place, you can use this conversation point to refine your purpose and goals.

The truth is, you do NOT work out purpose and goals in one glorious, inspired sitting. Nor do you do it alone. Purpose and goals are something you refine over weeks and months and years. This is why you need a regular conversation point.

Never transplant into your team a purpose and set of goals created in a sterile environment away from reality. Find out what you DO in reality, and then refine that to become better.

3. Then, encourage, encourage, encourage, encourage, encourage

Become the “Chief Encouragement Officer” of your team. Why? Because people repeat what is recognised and rewarded.

Ways to encourage people:

• Tell them what you value about them
• Celebrate their effort, regardless of outcome
• Notice what they do right
• Appreciate their intention, even when their actions are not right
• Speak well of team members behind each other’s backs (the only good thing to do behind someone’s back!)
• Speak well of team members right in front of each other’s faces, including in front of the big boss

Encouragement is free. But it is worth so much.