Inspiring your team to produce great results and to be loyal to your company takes commitment, time and effort from everyone in the organization. The results are worth it – with a tenfold increase in performance – provided people, including the CEO, can embrace change.
Inspiring your team
Modern business theories suggest that in order to have job satisfaction, employees need three components: purpose, autonomy and the means to master their role.
While employees are attracted to companies that pay well, there are many other factors that influence performance. For a software business, how you treat employees will have a far greater impact than how much you pay them.
Purpose
It is important to connect your company with a higher purpose, as people like to feel they are making a difference to something that is important to the world. They want to work for organizations that are doing something useful for the greater good. Companies also need to really reflect on the impact their business has on the environment, people and society. Having a social purpose, beyond profits, is a powerful way to motivate your team and impact their performance.
Autonomy
Your employees want to feel involved in company decisions and to have a say in how they work and achieve goals. It is important to provide employees with the autonomy to do their job the way that works best for them and to listen to their ideas. For example, the ability to work flexible hours, from home, and to take long vacations. If you offer the flexibility and tools to enable them to work autonomously, employees will be happier and more loyal.
We find flexible working lets employees fit work in with the demands of family life. This removes conflict and reduces stress, it also means they will put in extra hours away from the office. How your sales team find customers should be down to them, provided they meet targets. Some of the best sales people we know win their clients on the golf course.
Mastery
Employees want to feel valued, as experts in their role, and to have distinctive capabilities that set them apart. It is vital to provide them with ongoing training, mentoring and the time to develop their skills and knowledge.
In today’s job market there isn’t a lot of job security and people feel less vulnerable if they are able to develop skills that make them desirable. Despite being in demand, they are more likely to stick around if they feel valued, and the improvements in performance will be well worth the investment.
Management must change
The management team, as a whole, must take responsibility for ensuring the three components to employees’ job satisfaction are met. They must also be committed to improving their own performance.
We recommend reading Verne Harnish’s book Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It…and Why the Rest Don’t which provides ideas and tools on how to create a company where the team is engaged. It discusses four major decision areas every company must get right: People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash. We often use Verne’s techniques and have covered three of these four decision areas in our recent articles.
We also recommend reading the recently published Mastering Leadership: An Integrated Framework for Breakthrough Performance and Extraordinary Business Results, by Robert Anderson and William Adams, as this offers a pioneering approach to developing your senior management team; integrating traditional leadership theories with the psychology of the inner game.
Traditional approaches to leadership focus on things like effective use of resources, management systems, communication, and people development. However, the inner game is considered even more important; this explores how we make sense of the world, how we decide what to do, how we act, what values and beliefs we have, our identity, level of self-awareness and emotional intelligence.
The psychology of the inner game is often used in sport where an athlete’s mental attitude has been shown to have a significant impact on their performance. The book gives an example of two world figure skaters – one wanted to give a performance that merely minimized errors – the other wanted to go all out and give a once-in-a-life-time performance – the latter won because they were fully committed to giving their best.
D evelop your inner game
According to Mastering Leadership, leaders develop through stages: this starts from the Egocentric Leadership stage, with a controlling style, and moves on to the most common phase, a Reactive Leadership style, with a complying and controlling attitude that is dependant on how others perceive us. The next stage is Creative Leadership, where leaders share power and inspire. This is the most effective phase, but only 20% will reach this.
Moving from one leadership stage to another takes time, as you need to embrace change and identify your own character traits that hinder performance. It is important to assess your competencies, as perceived by your employees, and by yourself.
Then, by looking at the differences between the two, you can see what you need to improve. The book illustrates how common attitudes to leadership can actually get in the way of progress. Managers are often too dictatorial and self-centered and don’t see the negative effect that this has on their employees performance.
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There are lots of different methodologies that discuss how businesses should bring out organisation. We can help you identify the competencies and personal development required to be successful and coach you and your management team to help develop |
If you have a high performing leadership team, they will be more convincing when raising funds, will produce a better strategy, and will be more focused on execution.