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Fuelling growth
16 October 2024
Fuelling growth.
At the risk of sounding like a Labour party bigwig, this month’s blog is all about growth. Specifically, how you can fuel your business’ growth by building resilient, empowered teams.
I’m going to be provocative and say that I think teams have gone out of fashion of late. Leaders and leadership practices are endlessly profiled and debated in business media, podcasts and books. Equally, with recent well-publicised trends like the great resignation, quiet quitting, job nomadacy and side hustles, individuals and their career get a lot of airspace and attention too.
But in my humble opinion, teams are what make or break business performance. People want meaningful, enjoyable connection with their fellow workers and to work with people whose skills and expertise they respect. Hanging out with the team is more influential than any other factor in persuading people back willingly into offices. ‘Great colleagues’ is a consistent reason why people say they stay, from all the employee research I’ve done over the years. Conversely, ‘crap managers’ is still a major reason why people decide to leave. Research last year by the Chartered Management Insitute and YouGov found that half of those who say their bosses are ineffective plan to quit within the next year and a survey by Unmind of over 3,000 UK workers, 67% had left or considered leaving their job because of a bad manager.
If you’re lucky, you’ve experienced being part of a tightly bonded, high-performing team led by a capable, emotionally intelligent manager. You’ve known what it’s like to overcome challenges successfully together, to cope with everything that gets thrown at you and to still have fun along the way.
I’m going to be provocative and say that I think teams have gone out of fashion of late. Leaders and leadership practices are endlessly profiled and debated in business media, podcasts and books. Equally, with recent well-publicised trends like the great resignation, quiet quitting, job nomadacy and side hustles, individuals and their career get a lot of airspace and attention too.
But in my humble opinion, teams are what make or break business performance. People want meaningful, enjoyable connection with their fellow workers and to work with people whose skills and expertise they respect. Hanging out with the team is more influential than any other factor in persuading people back willingly into offices. ‘Great colleagues’ is a consistent reason why people say they stay, from all the employee research I’ve done over the years. Conversely, ‘crap managers’ is still a major reason why people decide to leave. Research last year by the Chartered Management Insitute and YouGov found that half of those who say their bosses are ineffective plan to quit within the next year and a survey by Unmind of over 3,000 UK workers, 67% had left or considered leaving their job because of a bad manager.
If you’re lucky, you’ve experienced being part of a tightly bonded, high-performing team led by a capable, emotionally intelligent manager. You’ve known what it’s like to overcome challenges successfully together, to cope with everything that gets thrown at you and to still have fun along the way.
But not everyone gets to have that experience. Some of the common frustrations I hear teams complain about are:
• Being overstretched and under-resourced.
• Being in firefighting mode all the time.
• Never getting time to think about improvements for tomorrow because they’re too busy delivering for today.
• Being confused and distracted by multiple communication channels and notifications.
• Finding it hard to focus on the important work.
• Reeling from one change initiative to another and never getting to 'steady state'.
• Being asked to deliver more and then more again, with nothing ever being taken off the team’s plate.
Managers aren’t blind to these frustrations or deliberately ignoring them; most of the time managers have great technical skills but lack the necessary skills in facilitation, workshop design and team effectiveness to coach the team into becoming a high-performing unit. The CMI found that 82% of UK managers are ‘accidental managers’, lacking any formal management training.
Leaders I speak to are only too aware of their teams’ frustrations, which are typically raised more than once via employee surveys and leaver intervews. Many leaders want their teams to be more proactive in resolving issues and finding solutions, instead of sitting back and waiting for leaders to dive in and fix everything for them.
So how do you build more resilient, empowered teams? These things help:
1. Holding people accountable for performing and transforming - for delivering business as usual and for continuously improving – and recognising this in team and individual goals.
2. Giving people permission and time to problem solve and make changes within their control. If they need a time code to recognise this investment of time and effort, set one up. If they need an inspiring or practical space to do this work, give them a small budget to go off-site.
3. Offering practical support such as an agenda for a ‘standback’ session, a facilitator to keep them on track and avoid getting bogged down, and some provocative questions and examples to spark their thinking.
4. Formalising post-deadline or post-project reviews so people take the time to reflect and learn and identify improvements for next time.
5. Encouraging teams to experiment, track the results and keep what works. This could be meeting-free windows to help people focus better, different ways of engaging with other teams involved in delivering the work, or new buddying and back-up arrangements to increase the resource flexibility across the team.
6. Making 1:1 coaching support available to the manager, so they have time and space to reflect on what they’re hearing, how they’re responding and how they in turn can coach their team.
7. Fixing the bigger sources of friction that are outside any single team’s control, by bringing the relevant people together and tasking them to find short-, medium- and long-term solutions.
If your business is serious about growth then you have to be really intentional about doing the things described above. With this relatively small investment (compared to a fancy new IT system or swanky office upgrade) your retention rates, employee engagement scores, and productivity measures will go up. People will manage demanding workloads better, feel more connected to the organisation and adapt quicker to the inevitable changes lurking round the next corner.
• Being overstretched and under-resourced.
• Being in firefighting mode all the time.
• Never getting time to think about improvements for tomorrow because they’re too busy delivering for today.
• Being confused and distracted by multiple communication channels and notifications.
• Finding it hard to focus on the important work.
• Reeling from one change initiative to another and never getting to 'steady state'.
• Being asked to deliver more and then more again, with nothing ever being taken off the team’s plate.
Managers aren’t blind to these frustrations or deliberately ignoring them; most of the time managers have great technical skills but lack the necessary skills in facilitation, workshop design and team effectiveness to coach the team into becoming a high-performing unit. The CMI found that 82% of UK managers are ‘accidental managers’, lacking any formal management training.
Leaders I speak to are only too aware of their teams’ frustrations, which are typically raised more than once via employee surveys and leaver intervews. Many leaders want their teams to be more proactive in resolving issues and finding solutions, instead of sitting back and waiting for leaders to dive in and fix everything for them.
So how do you build more resilient, empowered teams? These things help:
1. Holding people accountable for performing and transforming - for delivering business as usual and for continuously improving – and recognising this in team and individual goals.
2. Giving people permission and time to problem solve and make changes within their control. If they need a time code to recognise this investment of time and effort, set one up. If they need an inspiring or practical space to do this work, give them a small budget to go off-site.
3. Offering practical support such as an agenda for a ‘standback’ session, a facilitator to keep them on track and avoid getting bogged down, and some provocative questions and examples to spark their thinking.
4. Formalising post-deadline or post-project reviews so people take the time to reflect and learn and identify improvements for next time.
5. Encouraging teams to experiment, track the results and keep what works. This could be meeting-free windows to help people focus better, different ways of engaging with other teams involved in delivering the work, or new buddying and back-up arrangements to increase the resource flexibility across the team.
6. Making 1:1 coaching support available to the manager, so they have time and space to reflect on what they’re hearing, how they’re responding and how they in turn can coach their team.
7. Fixing the bigger sources of friction that are outside any single team’s control, by bringing the relevant people together and tasking them to find short-, medium- and long-term solutions.
If your business is serious about growth then you have to be really intentional about doing the things described above. With this relatively small investment (compared to a fancy new IT system or swanky office upgrade) your retention rates, employee engagement scores, and productivity measures will go up. People will manage demanding workloads better, feel more connected to the organisation and adapt quicker to the inevitable changes lurking round the next corner.
All of which will fuel your growth. And yes, Labour will love you.
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