1. Reframe Conflict.

At its core, conflict arises from differences in perspectives, ideas, and approaches. These differences, when acknowledged and addressed, can lead to better decision-making and problem-solving. When team members engage in healthy debate, they bring their unique insights to the table, challenging assumptions and pushing each other to think differently. This diversity of thought is invaluable in today’s complex business environment, where agility, efficiency and creativity are key to staying competitive.

2. Make it safe.

Healthy conflict starts with fostering open communication and mutual respect. Team members should feel comfortable expressing their opinions without fear of judgment or reprisal. As a leader, it’s essential to set the tone by demonstrating active listening and a willingness to consider different viewpoints. It’s equally important to set an example by encouraging your team to challenge your ideas and give you honest feedback. This creates a safe space for productive dialogue to flourish.

3. Establish conflict norms.

Teams should establish norms for managing conflict before it arises. Do we have differing personal or cultural perspectives on conflict? Is it ok to raise our voices? Use strong language or sarcasm? We might agree to use facts to support our arguments, focus on one problem at a time, and strive for win-win solutions whenever possible. By providing structure around conflict, you empower team members to navigate disagreements and buy into team decisions without reservation.

4. Build a feedback culture.

Effective leaders create an environment where ideas are rigorously scrutinized while the individuals presenting them are respected. These leaders go first by putting their own ideas up for review, asking for candid comments, and acting on the feedback they receive. They may even mine for conflict by asking questions like, “What is one way you’d argue against this idea?” or “If you were the client, how would you poke holes in this proposal?” When we’re comfortable giving and receiving feedback, we welcome others’ ideas as tools to sharpen our own.

4. Strike a balance.

Some of us avoid conflict (flight) while others attack (fight). Both tendencies can harm relationships and kill good ideas. Avoiding conflict allows resentments to fester, while personal attacks put everyone on the defensive. The leader’s job is to carve a middle path: Ask those who always speak up first to hold back until others have spoken, or to elicit feedback from quieter colleagues. Encourage quiet team members to play devil’s advocate or make an agreement that everyone present in a meeting will share their honest opinion. When the extremes are kept in check, conflict stays constructive.

In conclusion, remember that while conflict in the workplace may initially seem disruptive or uncomfortable, it has the potential to drive performance and boost productivity. By fostering a culture of open communication and mutual respect, leaders can encourage healthy conflict within teams. Embracing diversity of thought and providing structured guidelines for conflict resolution are also key in creating an environment where productive conflict can thrive. Ultimately, by viewing conflict as an opportunity rather than a threat, organizations can harness its power to achieve greater collaboration, creativity and success.

Stereotypes of each generation are everywhere. Some are generous. Others are demeaning. All are overstated and inaccurate since we are, after all, people – unique and  varied beyond labels. At the same time, each generation has different experiences with work, family, and technology. Some of these differences fuel the stereotypes.

Too often, instead of trying to understand and value each other, we use over-simplified generalizations to make judgments, assign blame, and dismiss one another. This fosters mistrust which always erodes relationships and, ultimately, our performance.

The remedy: curiosity, a genuine desire to learn, and real effort to build relationships. We are much more alike than different. So how do we work together more effectively? Here are three places leaders can start:

1. Communicate openly: listen and ask questions.

Many of our team challenges come down to different communication styles and preferences. How do we conduct meetings, give and receive feedback, hold each other accountable, and resolve conflict? What are appropriate protocols for email, virtual meetings, phone calls and other ways we share information? As Megan Gerhardt, the author of Gentelligence, says “. . . we shouldn’t expect our reasons for approaching work in particular ways to be clear to people who have grown up and started their professional lives at different points in time.”[2]

Great managers invite team members to state their preferences and dialogue to reach agreement about how the team can communicate most effectively. There will likely be many different preferences, but there are no right or wrong communication styles. Everyone should have a voice, but should also be ready to stretch beyond their comfort zone. The leader’s job is to find the middle ground, clarify communication protocols for the team, and ensure each member’s buy-in to the team’s agreed-upon norms of  communication.

2. Explore common values and purpose.

One of the best ways to break down generational barriers is to find common values and interests and set goals that give the whole team a shared sense of purpose.

This effort might include a volunteer opportunity that everyone can support. Working together as volunteers will build trust and camaraderie, particularly if we make it fun.

When developing team goals, find ways for each colleague to express their opinion. Don’t just set the goal; articulate goals so the whole team is represented. Perhaps even assign specific tasks so everyone is included.

In team meetings, include icebreakers that allow team members to share what they are passionate about. Or, invite team members to share one thing for which they are grateful. This eventually might become an invitation to express appreciation to each colleague. Personal and positive conversations help teams break down perceived barriers and strengthen bonds.

3. Mentor across age groups.

Take advantage of the work experiences and abilities of people from different generations. Allow them to mentor each other. A younger employee can help an older colleague with new technology. Older team members can help younger ones understand the company culture, strategic initiatives, or client history.

As we continually focus on the strengths that various generations bring to work and our team, we are reminded that we are all working together. Together we are stronger and more effective as a team.

Lynne Lancaster offers a fitting conclusion: “Everybody wants to show up at work and do some meaningful work that they care about with co-workers who they like and trust and have their backs. By getting to know the generations, I hope we can achieve that, because we all bring this array of magic into the work we do.”[3]

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/01/17/where-millennials-end-and-generation-z-begins/

[2] https://nihrecord.nih.gov/2022/06/10/expert-gets-us-talking-about-generations

[3] https://hbr.org/2021/08/how-to-manage-a-multi-generational-team

Most leaders are aware of the importance of emotional intelligence, but often focus their efforts solely on cultivating their personal “EQ.” Imagine how much more impactful we could be by building the emotional intelligence of our entire team! Emotionally intelligent teams inspire high levels of employee engagement and loyalty. They also get better, faster results.

Here are two research-based strategies to help you grow your team’s emotional intelligence:

1. Assess your team’s baseline and build trust.

How would you gauge your team’s current EQ? It’s tempting to think that an emotionally intelligent team is one on which everyone keeps their head down, focuses on their own work, and quietly gets along. Think again. Many such teams have a case of what Patrick Lencioni calls “artificial harmony.” That is, team members go along to get along, and are either fearful of speaking up or don’t care enough to do so.

A better measurement of emotional intelligence is how comfortable team members are disagreeing with each other or offering out-of-the-box solutions to problems. Teams who trust each other express opinions, ask questions, take risks, and own up to mistakes without fearing that they’ll be punished or humiliated. A climate of trust means your team has your back, so you can push yourself out of your comfort zone and encourage others to do the same.

To start building trust on your team:

• Get familiar with your team members’ personal histories, passions, values and motivations beyond their career goals. Talk about them during both informal and formal 1:1s.
• Create opportunities for team members to share their personal histories and passions with each other (for example, by taking turns planning team-building activities that reflect their backgrounds or interests).
• Model genuine vulnerability, curiosity, and openness.
• Use your own mistakes as learning opportunities for the team.
• Be honest about and request your team’s feedback on the areas in which you are striving to grow as a leader.

2. Improve your team meetings.

Meetings offer an invaluable window into how well a team works together. Are your team meetings boring? Does one person tend to dominate the discussion? Are there a few quiet folks who never speak up? Is it always up to you to keep things moving? Honest answers to these questions will likely reveal at least one or two growth areas. Meetings are the perfect place to plant seeds of emotional intelligence by encouraging openness, building trust, and engaging in constructive conflict.

When you’re aware of the specific issues you want to address, consider creative solutions. For example, to avoid artificial harmony, ask team members to play devil’s advocate and argue against an idea they would otherwise support. If one person always speaks up first and loudest, ask them to use their voice to solicit feedback from the quieter team members. If you run every meeting, start rotating leadership duties among all members. Other EQ-boosting meeting strategies include:

• Start meetings with a simple icebreaker that creates personal connection (A few examples: “What’s the best piece of advice you ever received?” “What’s one personal or professional win you’ve experienced since our last meeting?”)
• In virtual meetings, ask team members to agree to a “cameras on and no multitasking” policy.
• Rotate one person in the role of note-taker during meetings to free up other team members to be fully engaged (The authors of Emotional Intelligence 2.0 argue that note-taking causes us to “miss the critical clues that shed some major light on how others are feeling or what they may be thinking.”)
• Create space for team members to appreciate each other’s contributions out loud.
• As trust grows on your team, model and encourage the sharing of honest feedback, mistakes, and lessons learned from failures. This paves the way for teams to hold each other mutually accountable.

In Conclusion…

Emotionally intelligent teams are effective, productive, and even fun. But the best news about emotional intelligence is that it’s contagious. Leaders who model behaviors and implement strategies like these will see results: teams who trust each other and feel safe and supported challenging themselves and others to grow. Investing in your team’s emotional intelligence might just be the most impactful leadership decision you make.

Tom wants to advance. He is ambitious. He’s a skilled contributor within his team and beyond. In his organization, the next step forward is to become a team leader. He takes that step with confidence and enthusiasm. But one year later, his team is faltering. Morale is falling. Two of his best team members have moved on to other firms. Tom is discouraged and confused.

If you are like me, you dreaded working in teams when you were in school. I treated teamwork as if it all depended on me. Many in my involuntary team liked that approach and let me do (what felt like) most of the work. Like Tom, I was driven and successful when working independently. I never considered that my professional success would depend so much on working interdependently as part of a team. 

Yet here we are! We ARE working together, and our organization depends on the success of its most basic building block – teams.

Tom’s story is a common one. Many of us make the transition from highly skilled employee to struggling team leader. How can Tom strengthen his team and his approach to leadership? Here are three keys to successful team development:

1. Focus on relationships 

“Knowing your stuff” technically is not enough to lead a team. Effective team leaders also know and are known by their teammates. Patrick Lencioni famously reminds us that leaders must demonstrate vulnerability to build trust. The more open we are, the more others will follow our example. The more a team trusts each other, the more productive and effective they will become. That’s because team members know it’s safe to discuss issues deeply, engage in productive conflict, and hold each other accountable. They commit fully when decisions are made, and they focus on and achieve results together. 

Every team model includes trusting relationships somewhere in the foundation. Ignore trust and you will fail as a team leader. So, what’s a leader to do?

• Evaluate your “trust quotient.” Do you trust your team? How well does your team trust you?  What holds you back from being authentic and human with your team? Who could help you seek better personal understanding? What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses or potential blind spots? How are you sharing yourself with others?
• Get to know your team as individuals. Who are they? Where are they from? What was their family of origin like? What led them to choose this career? What do they find easy? Where are their challenges? What are their strengths? Where do they want to grow and develop? What are they passionate about?

2. Measure success carefully

We tend to get what we measure. So how do you quantify success as a team leader – profit, utilization, budget, deadlines, quality, employee retention and engagement? These are all important and quantifiable, but they are almost always lagging indicators. They are the results of an effective team.

Consider some leading indicators of success. Here are some goals you might score and keep visible for your team weekly:  

• Establish and agree to weekly milestones. What project tasks must be completed this week? Who is assigned? What’s the deadline? How well are we coordinating the handoffs?
• Measure the climate of team meetings. Do we readily admit personal mistakes or weaknesses? Are we mutually accountable to follow through? How well do we disagree and resolve these conflicts? Could you give this a score each week and then discuss the team climate?
• Clarify overall team goals for the short term (three to four months). Are we making progress or lagging behind? What group and individual accomplishments are acknowledged? Where do we need to improve?

3. Develop leaders at all levels

To be a leader one must develop personal responsibility in each team member. This is not about titles or formal authority. This is about personal ownership.

Think about your team members. Are you giving them the opportunity to lead themselves, stand on their own, follow through, and invest in others? Are you continuing to grow as a leader and making those efforts visible to your team? Who is your likely successor? How can you acknowledge the progress of individuals and the group? Who needs encouragement? How are you coaching each person to take ownership?  

Teams are fascinating organisms. They are ever-changing. Your organization and manager measure your success as a leader by how your team functions together to get results. You cannot do the work alone. You must orchestrate the team. As the conductor or maestro, you must know every player, coordinate the processes and effort, and develop leaders who take ownership.

The best coaches are genuine partners who work alongside their teams to build their capacity, competence, and skills. They understand that they must be present for the people they lead and thus appreciate that their own success is embedded in the team’s accomplishments. 

Here are four leadership coaching techniques that can help you position your team for success.

Build Relationships & Know Your People

Authentic leadership coaching occurs when trust is established beforehand. Naturally, the better we know those we’re coaching, the better we can imagine the best approach to lead them. The ideal follow-up frequency, their preference for feedback, and their strengths and weaknesses are all learned as you get to know your people. 

Trust building is often counterintuitive. Your own vulnerability can help pave the way for those you’re coaching to be vulnerable and open themselves. So, sharing how you are growing and admitting your own mistakes and shortcomings can help build mutual trust.

Ultimately, a trust-based relationship with your team establishes that you have each member’s best interest in mind. When it comes to addressing mistakes and shortcomings, where defensiveness is to be expected, trust will be especially helpful in working through the issue to effectively forge a path forward.

Start With a Collaborative Goal 

All successful teams and companies have goals. Your prior knowledge of your team and its individual members should dictate the best approach to leadership coaching to determine and achieve yours. Paul Thorton suggests three general coaching styles:

• Directing. Telling your team the goal and why it’s required
• Discussing. Asking questions and establishing the goal as a group
• Delegating. Ask your team to establish a goal and return with a rationale for their new goal

No matter what style you choose to use, your team must own the goal. Even if you use a directing approach, allow the team to debate and tweak the goal so they feel like they have a say and will be more committed to undertaking it.

Not only does a collaborative goal encourage and motivate your team, but it also holds everyone — including you — mutually accountable for the goal’s progress or hindrance.

Develop an Action Plan

Every goal needs a clear, measurable, specific action plan so both you and your team can observe your progress and achievement (or lack thereof). 

Part of leadership coaching is guiding your team to make achievable goals. SMART goals, when done well, can help create both an effective goal and an action plan and should be:

Specific. Lay out your exact goals. If your team wants to achieve the highest sales in your division, for example, set a dollar amount or number of sales to work toward.

Measurable. Immeasurable goals (like “the highest sales”) aren’t great motivators. An amount of dollars or a number of sales give you a specific number to strive for, which makes it easier to know when you’ve achieved that goal and when you can push the goal post further.

Attainable. Be realistic. Unattainable goals make teams lose steam fast.

Results-oriented. Ask your team to find and outline their why. The goal should be tied to their why, giving them a purpose and a reason to achieve it.

Time-stamped deadlines. Giving yourselves a deadline prevents slacking or aimlessly striving for a goal.

A good rule of thumb is that subjective goals require the manager to decide the outcome. Effective leadership coaching, however, means measuring the goal objectively and ensuring the data is available to both manager and employees.

Follow Up

A goal without a plan is just a dream. Following up with your team regularly allows you to discuss what went well, what worked and didn’t work, what needs to be improved, and where the plan can be refined. 

As your team questions like, “How do you think it’s going?” and “Are you happy with the results?” See their answers as opportunities to monitor progress, offer encouragement, provide additional leadership coaching support, and praise accomplishments.

Leadership coaching is an effective tool in the manager’s toolbox that should be used often and effectively. It’s on-the-job training that helps employees connect the dots and see the big picture. We all desire independent, motivated, and engaged problem-solvers and active learners. Leadership coaching promises that outcome.  

How do you use leadership coaching with your team? Let me know in the comments!

Our lives and workplaces are filled with distractions, and motivation can only propel us for so long before we start to lose steam. While personal resolve might keep us committed to staying on course, willpower and determination are what ultimately lead to accomplishing our goals.

If the winter blues is affecting workplace morale, here are five ways to encourage your team to push through and be proactive.

Have a Clear Purpose

Knowing what you want is the foundation of lasting change, but if your purpose is unclear to your team, they’ll quickly lose focus and steam. Be proactive by clearly laying out your company values, goals, and procedures. 

Even more importantly, emphasize your why. In other words, why, exactly, does the company do what it does, and why is it so important? Keep it simple and focus on your most important goal. That way, there’s no room for confusion and your team will have an easier time staying on track.

Be Honest With Yourself

By setting unrealistic or unattainable goals, you’re setting your team up for failure and almost guaranteeing they’ll lose motivation early on. While there’s nothing wrong with dreaming big, you’ll find your team is more motivated to be proactive (and, as a result, is more successful) when those big dreams are broken into smaller, more realistic goals. 

Be honest with yourself when it comes to goal setting. What are your and your employees’ strengths, and how can you leverage them to address the change you seek? Once you have a set of honest, realistic goals, you can create a plan to achieve them.

Make a Plan

Even the most productive, hard-working people have off days, and there’s nothing wrong with admitting that to yourself. Likewise, it’s important that you understand that your employees will have those days, too.

Instead of expecting 100% perfection, make a plan to get back on track. Encourage your team to take breaks when necessary and be proactive in the ways that they can — even when motivation is low. Sometimes, all it takes is a short coffee break or a walk around the block to regain inspiration.

Make It Public

Making your intentions public is a great way to hold yourself accountable for your goals. Encourage your team to vocalize their professional goals, and hold consistent team meetings where you go over your intentions as a company. In both cases, it helps to lay out the steps you’re taking to realize those goals. 

Most importantly, foster a supportive, judgment-free environment where your employees feel comfortable sharing their obstacles and failures. A workplace where people know they can fail is one where they feel more comfortable taking risks and are less likely to lose motivation or become stagnant.

Move Past Your Comfort Zone

We all have personal preferences and find comfort in our routines. Encourage your employees to be proactive by aiming outside of their comfort zones and approaching obstacles with different perspectives.

By creating a unified workplace where employees can bounce ideas off one another, you can prevent methods from becoming repetitive and nurture a revolving door of new ideas and approaches.

Resolve is the key ingredient in all personal and corporate change efforts. Wishing for your employees to be proactive is too passive to make a difference when motivation begins to wane. Instead, try fostering a workplace where employees feel comfortable making mistakes and taking risks to achieve their goals.

How do you encourage your team to be proactive? Let me know in the comments!

Organizational culture is a compilation of your company’s mission, expectations, and practices that guide your team through its day-to-day operations and foster a sense of community among your customer base. The stronger and clearer a company’s values, the more efficiently teams can work together to drive and maintain its success.

Here’s what to know about cultivating your company’s organizational culture for long-term success.

Your Organizational Culture Defines Your Values

Any successful company must have a concrete set of values to define its culture. After all, your organizational culture shapes your workplace environment and thus the atmosphere that greets your employees (and depending on your industry, your customers) each time they enter.

Intentional processes can be created to define corporate values and beliefs. At CrossGroup, we use a process that goes beyond simply asking leaders to write out abstract ideal values and instead paints a picture of exactly what their values look like in practice. Ask yourself the following questions.

• What are our assumptions and beliefs associated with a particular value?
• How do our values become the framework to support our purpose and mission?
• What behaviors and actions will we encourage among all our people?
• What behaviors and actions will we not tolerate?

If you’re struggling to define your values, start by finding your why — that is, the reason your company does what it does. From there, your values should flow naturally.

Your Culture Is Unique

In their book “Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture,” authors Kim S. Cameron and Robert E. Quinn describe their competing values framework with four competing values: stability and control versus flexibility and discretion, and internal focus versus external focus. 

In combination, this quadrant analysis gives meaning and description in defining your prioritized values. As your company’s leader, it’s your job to determine the specific cultural types you want your organization to embody. 

There’s no right or wrong answer, but having a clear-cut idea of your company’s cultural type will help you more accurately shape your unique organizational culture and implement the values you’ve chosen to model through your business.

A Strong Organizational Culture Welcomes Feedback

Intentional, meaningful dialogue between leaders and their teams can help merge your company’s purpose with values. Welcoming feedback from your employees and customers allows you to zero in on your core values and strengthen your overall culture. 

While there is no “good” or “bad” organizational culture, there is strong and weak. A strong culture is all about alignment: Leaders must be aligned in their behavior and mutually accountable within their teams, while simultaneously empowering employees to speak up and share feedback.

In a strong culture, teams can set strategies and achieve goals more efficiently, businesses become more defined in their respective industries, and in the face of a crisis, leaders can make decisions more effectively. Over time, the culture will solidify and become a force that defines your organization.

Organizational Culture Can Make or Break You

Culture is behavioral — and it’s all around us. Organizational culture is the social norms of every company we support, and it becomes the sum total of a society’s values and beliefs. 

A strong culture guides activity through shared assumptions and group norms. Once formed, it controls the behaviors we encourage and tolerate among our employees. The benefits of cultivating a strong organizational culture extend beyond simply creating a strong, memorable brand and into the attitudes and loyalty of our teams.

What are you doing to foster conversations about organizational culture at your firm? Let us know in the comments!

According to Harvard Business Review, 4 million Americans quit their jobs in July 2021 alone. By the end of the same month, there were 10.9 million open jobs across the U.S. Evidently, something about our existing workforce dynamic isn’t working. So how can we, as leaders, preserve our teams? 

Here are five employee retention strategies to not only mitigate the effects of the Great Resignation but also foster a workplace environment your employees will never want to leave.

Let Them Be Heard

The most important of all employee retention strategies is to give your employees a voice. Anytime you stifle your teams’ voices, you teach them their perspectives don’t matter, and worse, you shut yourself off to potentially valuable feedback. 

Transparency is the key to showing your employees you value their voices — especially if your company is in the process of addressing workplace practices that previously discouraged open and honest communication.

Above all, the most lasting engagement strategy is the manager’s investment of time and energy in listening to individual employees and fostering meaningful dialogue. As managers listen and take action, loyalty and commitment will follow.

Give Performance Feedback

Respectful feedback fosters growth. As a leader, you demonstrate that you’re engaged and that you care about your employees’ success within the company by offering regular, constructive feedback.

Make a conscious effort to acknowledge each individual’s hard work and express appreciation, and let your employees know that they matter to you, your clients, and the organization’s success.

Likewise, create ways for employees to share input both publicly and privately. The best way to determine whether your employee retention strategies are working is to welcome feedback with open arms. In return, show your appreciation by providing a safe, unified workplace.

Support Professional Development

If you want your employees to invest their time into growing your company, you need to demonstrate that the company is investing in them, as well. Too many employees today complain that they don’t see a clear path to advance or know where they stand within the company.

Take action to work with your team to establish and regularly revisit their career goals. Perhaps the company can fully or partially cover courses related to each employees’ career advancement or host workplace events dedicated to training and sharpening skills.

Also, remember that employee retention strategies don’t have to be complicated; they can take many avenues beyond supporting formal training. Showing interest in your team’s professional development can be as simple as giving employees temporary job assignments in areas of interest or even offering peer coaching opportunities within the company.

Prioritize Work-Life Balance

A healthy work-life balance should be at the top of every company’s list of employee retention strategies. Most organizations today have high expectations for their employees. Alternatively, ambitious employees may put pressure on themselves to go “above and beyond,” by working overtime or taking their responsibilities home with them. 

But for workers, this can mean less time devoted to personal care, leisure activities, and family. They may start and end the week exhausted and eventually resent the company. When your team members are well-rested and have adequate time to care for themselves and their families, they perform better at work. 

Consider voicing explicit expectations discouraging your team from working during off hours. With work-from-home allowances extended during the pandemic, employees are expecting flexibility, so it may also be worth creating a hybrid work model where employees can opt to work from home.

Earn Their Trust

Employees perform better when they trust managers and the people assigning them tasks. They are more likely to achieve the goals that are set for them when they believe in the person who’s getting them to do the work.

Implementing the above employee retention strategies will naturally gain your employees’ trust, but other strategies include being open and willing to admit your own mistakes, avoiding favoritism, and getting to know them personally.

By building a foundation of trust with your team beyond a traditional employer-employee relationship, your employees will feel more inclined to stay loyal to you and your company.

There’s a saying that people don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad bosses. Perhaps the Great Resignation is a wake-up call for leaders to brainstorm new employee retention strategies and show our teams how valuable they are to us.

How does your company show appreciation to its employees? Leave a comment below!

Changing “to” to “for” changed everything for me. I have always resisted the phrase that I am accountable to someone. As a leader, I’m accountable for my team’s failures, successes, and professional growth. Fostering accountability, then, is an essential part of building and growing a cohesive, efficient, and most importantly, loyal team.

Here’s how you can encourage your team to hold themselves and one another accountable.

Focus on Helping Over Hierarchy 

When we focus on helping over hierarchy, we shift our focus from dictating to encouraging our teams. Leaders and CEOs often see their roles as being to run a tight ship, ensure mistakes aren’t made, and punish the appropriate parties when mistakes do happen.

Instead of taking a punitive approach, encourage your organization’s leaders to work with their team to find solutions that benefit everyone. By being helpful and curious, you can foster an environment where holding oneself accountable becomes second nature and employees feel comfortable owning up to their mistakes.

In his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni emphasizes that when teams continually build trust and mine for productive conflict, they become mutually accountable to move forward with their commitments. In other words, accountability produces cohesive teams that work together to achieve exceptional results.

Ask Questions

As a leader, asking questions shows your team you value their insight and logic. If you don’t necessarily agree with a particular process or result, instead of immediately pointing out what you perceive as a mistake, inquire into how your employee came to his or her conclusion or why he or she chose to approach the task in that particular way.
Most importantly, ask your team, “How can I help?” We sometimes hesitate to ask how we can help for fear that we’ll be held accountable in the event that mistakes are made, but it doesn’t have to be the case. You can provide meaningful dialogue, offer feedback, or remove obstacles for the sake of a smoother, more efficient workplace.

The time investment required to dig beneath the surface and discover customers’ wants and needs holds many companies back from seeking a deeper insight into how exactly they can support the best interests of those who support them.

Here’s how your company can focus on team development to gain insight on your customers and make a positive impact in 2022.

Put the Client First

Without loyal customers and employees, no business would survive. So when it comes to planning your 2022 strategy, every decision you make should focus on the following question: How will our customers be impacted by this decision? 

Go beyond data compilation and put yourself in their shoes. Ask yourself what resources are available or unavailable to them. What do they expect and need from me? How can my company make a positive impact on the community?

Now, ask those same questions about your employees. Understanding their workarounds for unaddressed challenges (both internally and externally) will give you insight into their needs and how they’re currently solving those needs for themselves. 

From there, you can establish ways to facilitate team development, foster meaningful workplace dialogue, and strategize more effectively. Solving these everyday challenges not only creates efficiency but also builds loyalty and relationships.

Be Transparent

Mistakes happen, whether as a result of miscommunication, an oversight in quality assurance, or a team development conflict. What’s important is that you own up to those mistakes and make a clear plan to avoid them in the future.

Two weeks into Mary Barra’s new role as the Chairman and CEO of General Motors (and the first female CEO of a major automotive company), for example, the company faced a scandal when a defective ignition switch caused more than 100 deaths. 

Instead of deflecting blame or twisting the facts, Barra held the company responsible and implemented new policies to prevent the situation from happening again. Unsurprisingly, her advice to graduating students at the University of Michigan was to address problems right away — otherwise, they’ll only get bigger. 

Likewise, consider whether there are any problems within your company that you might be ignoring. Try making a list of obstacles, then get your team together to work on a plan to overcome them.

Be Curious

Effective team development requires insightful leaders to exhibit an underlying curiosity and desire to know more. A good leader actively takes the initiative to learn new information, which demonstrates engagement and loyalty to company goals. 

Keeping your skills and knowledge up to date will give you the competitive edge you need to lead effectively and stimulate new ways of thinking in colleagues. Examine how these skills will help achieve long-term goals — like fostering team development and building stronger customer relationships — and identify the skills needed to achieve them.

By creating an environment that encourages the free flow of new knowledge and perspectives, you can openly examine mistakes and see setbacks as opportunities to learn and build solutions that will better serve employees and customers alike.

Focus on Team Development

Reid Hoffman, the Cofounder of LinkedIn, co-authored The Alliance, a book that explores the employer–employee relationship. He advises being open and learning what your employees care about to strengthen team development and build trust.

To offset the power dynamics, Hoffman suggests leading with integrity by first opening up about your own goals. Share your perceived strengths and weaknesses and be open to feedback. Above all else, be a courageous leader who follows through with what you discover. No one wants to follow a leader who pontificates but takes little action.

By diving into the mindset of both your customers and your employees, you can gain a better understanding of their wants and needs. Equipped with that deeper insight, you can then strategize and execute to make a positive impact on your community in the new year.
Is your team dedicated to gaining insight into your customers and prioritizing team development in 2022? Contact The CrossGroup for help creating an effective strategy!