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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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Growing successfully as a business means first letting go of old ways of operating; only then can people fully embrace the new.
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How are those 2024 goals looking? If you’re the type of person who loves setting New Year resolutions and making aspirational plans for the coming 12 months, but then feels downcast a few weeks or months later when all those intentions look over-ambitious or have fallen by the wayside, then this blog post will cheer you up, I guarantee. Because I’ve discovered a better way to start the year: by recognising that we’re already living our future today. Let me unpack that. People today say they are time poor and the stats shed light on why: work intensity has increased steadily over the past 20 years, leisure time has fallen - plus we don’t tend to use it wisely - and we spend more of our time parenting our children than previous generations, or caring for elderly dependents. When we’re time poor, we tend to feel under pressure to get things done, stay on top of things and keep all those plates spinning as efficiently as possible. We’re always thinking about what’s coming up next and the future that we’re working towards. (My vision of the future? Older me is effortlessly churning out bestseller books from an idyllic coastal eco-cottage, in between bouts of sea-swimming and long clifftop yomps. What’s yours?). The problem is, that future is always slightly out of grasp. So we keep on striving to get there. Hand-in-hand with tomorrow-chasing is beating ourselves up about the big things what we haven’t achieved yet or on a smaller scale, tasks we haven’t ticked off our daily or weekly to-do lists. I had a great 2023 – busy, healthy, enjoyable – but reading back over my mid-year plan was a frustrating litany of ‘not done’, ‘not done’, ‘not done’, from my updating my website to launching my new Time-Intelligence online diagnostic for teams and organisations. Hal Hershfield, Professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management and author of Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today came on my podcast The Business of Being Brilliant in September. He advises ‘ not to always live life for tomorrow’ and to ‘ have some self compassion and self forgiveness. It's really easy to beat ourselves up because we're falling short of the things that we said we wanted to do. And that's not really fair to our present selves’. What we don’t typically pay so much attention to – or even notice at all – are all the things we’re already doing today that are to be celebrated or that quite simply, we find enjoyable or rewarding. As Hal says ‘ I think we do a disservice to our future selves by telling ourselves that we're working for them, but in reality we're missing the present and then what sort of life does that add up to?’ I notice the same unhelpful tendency in organisations, where we’re equally future-obsessed. As soon as one project is over, the next one begins. We sprint from one deadline to the next without pausing for breath or taking time to reflect, appreciate, learn or reconsider. It’s a common refrain I hear people say in my Time-Intelligent Teams workshops . It’s a chronic case of organisational impatience, and it’s not a recipe for long-term, sustainable high performance. So what’s the antidote? It’s to ask ourselves ‘are we there already?’ This question is reminiscent of the dreaded ‘are we there yet?’ that every child asks, usually 10 minutes after leaving home (yep, you did it too) and that makes every driver want to scream. But ‘are we there already?’ is different. It invites us to reflect on what we’re doing today and the outcomes we’re bringing about. It helps us to see afresh the seams of richness layered through our work or home lives that we’ve been neglecting to notice and whose absence we’d sorely regret. By asking ‘are we there already?’ or ‘am I there already?’, we can look differently at what we spend our time on today and appreciate those things we do that are working well for us right here, right now. In other words, the ways in which we’re already living our future today. In my #timeintelligence workshops, I help teams identify all the positive aspects of the way they work that is enabling them to deliver on their goals, often under intense time pressure and resource constraints. In parallel with celebrating these strengths and successes, we look for changes within their control that can help them overcome the challenges or frustration and make best use of their time at work. So instead of setting some traditional resolutions, why not try setting some ‘living my future today’ resolutions? By listing a few things that you already do and would like to continue doing/do more often because they bring you joy, respite, connection, growth, inspiration, fulfilment, contentment or some other benefit. Here are some of my ‘living my future today’ resolutions: 1. Doing a short writing sprint every day to make sense of some half-formed musings, explore the seed of an idea or untangle a mental confusion. The world makes a bit more sense after each sprint. 2. Playing the piano every day that I’m at home, because I find it a magical antidote to a racing mind and it brings back treasured memories of jamming on the piano with my father. 3. Keeping up my daily running streak (today was day #1,151) because I love it and I want to stay mobile and independent until I’m headed for the next world. 4. Sticking with my ‘Review, Celebrate, Plan’ habit where at the end of each week, I review how the week has gone, celebrate things I feel proud of and plan for the week ahead. Cup of tea and large slice of cake in hand. 5. Saying yes to coffees and phone calls with friends even when work and life feel too busy and I’m tempted to say ‘not this week’. I never regret making the time. Why not ask the same question to colleagues in your team? Your close friends or family? It might spark a new kind of conversation. And you might well discover that your future has already arrived.