Engaging Your Team: Part 1

Faster leaders are more successful leaders. Being able to quickly sort through information to determine what is critical, sizing up people accurately and rapidly, establishing work environments that are fast paced and full of positive energy, and establishing a direction that is compelling are indispensable skills that translate directly into faster leadership.

However, working against the leader’s capacity for speed are things like lower levels of employee engagement, workforce skepticism, economic upheaval, organizational inertia, and the sheer volume of competing priorities and things that need to get done. Many leaders find themselves in the position of competing for the attention and mindshare of people in their organizations which significantly slows them down. It is like you are always pushing the boulder up the hill.

Everyone uses priority filters to deal with the overwhelming amount of information and demands we get bombarded with on a minute by minute basis. While your need for action or response may be quite high, your team may have filters in place that end up placing your call to action at the bottom of their list. The result is that your progress is slow and the level of effort you need to expend to get something done is high. When ownership is not felt by the other person, you end up supplying the motivational fuel. 

You can’t mandate commitment, it is a choice. Getting through someone’s filters and eliciting their commitment involves persuasion and influence. Investing in these activities early in the engagement process dramatically speeds up your leadership and improves performance. Your potential for success will be dramatically increased if you use what I call the RCI™ model. Being a faster leader involves establishing relevancy, addressing costs and consequences, and communicating importance and immediacy. This model can equally be applied to individuals, teams, or organizations.

Relevancy

We all make decisions and judgments regarding whether or not something touches us, is connected to us, or is meaningful. Things that we define as relevant are things that impact us in positive or negative ways, and touch us personally. Generally, we make time or commit resources to issues that are connected to us and we ignore or minimize what we define as non-relevant. Issues that top the relevancy list include such things as security, job satisfaction, the ability to impact outcomes, being included and valued, autonomy, work role and responsibility, family and personal life, recognition, and connection. When something passes our relevancy test, we make the decision that it is important to us and our well-being, and we respond to it.

Faster leaders understand that helping others establish a personal connection to a challenge is a critical aspect of employee engagement. If someone sees an activity as personally relevant they will supply more of their own motivation, be more self-managed and tenacious in pursuing the result. I recommend that you follow a three-step process to establish relevancy. First, build an understanding of the framework and resonating themes of the people you are leading. Second, use this understanding and translate it into vision and action that speak to others by connecting it to their desires, needs, and hopes. Third, overcome objections, resistance, and apathy by reinforcing the messages over time and modeling the behavior. Faster leaders formulate a powerful answer to the question that is in everyone’s mind “why should I care?”

Stay tuned for Part 2.

Comments

[allushan]

Thanks for the Information.. Can you post any management training seminar blogs.. it will help us to know more about the leadership skills for business