DEVELOPS EXCELLENCE
AN INTRODUCTION TO DEVELOPING EXCELLENCE
Great leaders are focused on increasing other people’s belief in their ability and see it as a priority to help others raise their performance. People feel powerful and supported around them. However, they balance this with an open and honest communication style that encourages performance-focused feedback and challenges people to get better and better at what they do.
EMPATHY AND TRUST
41. I build strong relationships through empathy and trust. Or put another way: are you investing in relationships?
People will trust you, be they client, colleague or employee, to the extent that they know what your values are, and to the extent that they know you can be relied on to act in accordance with your values. If people don’t know what your values are, they will not trust you and will not follow you. The more you are trusted by your colleagues, the more you will get from them and the more your team will thrive.
Beware: trust is as fragile as it is valuable. Lose it once and some people are not keen to extend it to you again in quite the same way. You can guard against this if you know what elements go to increasing trust. Understanding the elements of trust enables you to build these and make sure you do not destroy them. Trust sits at the cornerstone of all leadership relationships.
Leaders know that the element that has the largest single effect on the degree of trust someone will place in them is their orientation towards others. People need to be sure that you are clearly working for the greater good, for the team or the other person’s benefit before your own. This is not to say that you will not have an agenda to achieve. It is just that, if someone feels you are out only for what you can get, you will undermine any other efforts to build trust and empathy. The more people sense leaders are genuinely interested in them and helping them to explore avenues of improvement, the more trust is built.
If people feel that you have let them down, the assumption might be that you were not focused on them sufficiently and that your attention was too firmly focused on what you felt was important to you. Failing to do what you said you were going to do when you said you were is often interpreted as a huge dose of self-orientation.
LEADING MY TEAM
- Really take time to get to know your team and what is important to them – professionally for sure, and personally, when the time and setting is right to do so.
- Work alongside members of your team whenever a situation presents itself where you can add some value. Be seen to be keen to help without getting dragged into micro-managing or doing work you don’t need to do.
- Avoid over-promising. People prefer an over-achiever to an over-promiser.
- When you are given privileged information, retain the confidentiality that has been placed in you.
- Consider what projects and tasks to delegate to your team members based on their aspirations.
- Additionally, be aware of how people are at any given time and perhaps take a decision not to delegate something to them because of current workload or personal challenges.
LEADING MY ORGANISATION
- Take potential solutions to your line manager, rather than problems, wherever you can. Do the heavy lifting of the thinking before presenting issues to them.
- On occasion, when you know your own line manager is overwhelmed, consider not troubling them with your challenges until things calm down.
- Go one step further and offer to take away anything from your boss that they might find useful to be relieved of. Sometimes, like you, they will get so into the current situation that they’ll simply forget to ask for help and try to spin all plates all the time. You can be a great help in such situations.
- Reflect on how your peers present ideas and make decisions. Next time it would be useful to get their help or influence them to take an action, position it being mindful of the perspectives they tend to take, as you’ll find this approach far more effective.
FEEDBACK
42. I provide and encourage performance-focused feedback. Or put another way: how can we get better at what we do?
Great leaders develop the ability to accurately reflect on their own performance at work, identifying areas of strength that they could build on and gaps that they need to address. However, they are also never shy of asking others to provide feedback on how they could get better.
You may be aware of what is going on for you, but you can only judge how you are ‘being’ for other people by asking them. Asking others what they appreciate about you, and what you could do differently to be even more effective, is the only way to develop true self-awareness.
Lord Sebastian Coe, former Olympic Gold medal athlete, goes even further with his illustration of the importance of feedback in building a culture of high performance:
If you know something that will help me to get better at what I do – and you are not telling me – you are letting me down.
Simply, if you want to encourage feedback within your team, then you need to be a great model for it, both giving and receiving.
And remember, when you ask for feedback, make sure you accept it in the spirit in which it is being offered – to make things or you better. Be open and grateful for their time and input, no matter what you learn about yourself.
What of those who have been asked to provide feedback? What should be their guiding principles? Quite simply, if you are looking to help people to want to grow and improve, do the following:
- Make your feedback constructive, using it to positively reinforce good performance and highlight areas for improvement.
- Provide specific information and examples to back up your comments.
- Base your remarks on personal observations rather than hearsay.
Above all, set aside personal feelings of like or dislike in order to provide fair and balanced commentaries. This will genuinely open up opportunities for personal development.
LEADING MY TEAM
- Explain to your team the role of feedback in building a high-performance culture.
- Explore together how the team fares currently in terms of providing high quality to each other, from you and to you and stakeholders outside the team. Seek to understand why things are as they are.
- Commit over the long term to create a culture of high-performance feedback – avoid making this a big thing for a couple of weeks and then sliding backwards.
- Ask team members in your one-to-one conversations:
- How am I doing?
- What do I need to do more/less?
- What can I do differently to bring out the best in you?
- Build performance feedback into project plans both at the completion of the project and, importantly, on an ongoing basis. Make sure people act on feedback.
LEADING MY ORGANISATION
- Whenever you are asked to contribute to 360° reports for other people, whether your team, peers or your line manager, consider
it an honour and give it the due time, care and attention it
deserves. - Ask your own line manager and peers for feedback on your performance on a regular basis. This is a bit of a balance as ‘regular basis’ can soon turn into ‘all the time’ and become a bit of a burden to others, so judge this carefully. As long as you have sufficient data to keep making improvement, then enough is enough.
- Seek a mentor from within your organisation. Contract with them to provide you with some feedback on actually observed performance. Invite them to attend your team meetings and other important events and to discuss their views on your accomplishment.
COACH
43. I treat people as individuals and coach them towards excellence. Or put another way: there are no cookie-cutters here!
Effective leaders employ different styles to suit the situation. Their approach is dictated by a number of factors. Over time, leaders add styles that enable them to choose the best approach for each situation and each person. Leader-as-coach is one such style that works in several settings and can be added to your existing toolkit.
Here are three key tips to adopting a coaching approach into your management styles:
- Not in every situation. There are a few situations when coaching is probably unhelpful. If there is immediate risk (personal, physical or reputational), a clear, well-communicated and directive approach probably works better. But there are plenty of opportunities when you can use a coaching approach:
- performance reviews
- project management challenges
- attaining specific KPIs
- career discussions.
All the above and more benefit from you asking great questions and paying attention to the answers you get.
- Not with everyone. It can be a challenge to coach upwards – to your boss. The culture of coaching within an organisation needs to be well established before it is easy to manage upwards this way.
Additionally, some people just don’t want to be coached at that moment. We’re just being pragmatic in acknowledging that at times people just want the solution. Coaching is demanding for both parties: if someone is too tired to engage, they may just be happy for you to tell them the answer and occasionally we think that’s ok. - Not if you remain unconvinced. There will be little worse for your team, your organisation and perhaps yourself than engaging in coaching without full commitment. You can’t do it well without bringing your whole self to each coaching conversation.
Our advice: try a ‘little and often’ approach. No need to book a meeting room for two hours and attempt a full-on coaching session. You aren’t a coach. You are a leader who uses a coaching style. Look for opportunities to engage in coaching conversations in real time, such as at the water cooler, on the walk to lunch and so on
Ask.
Pay attention to the reply.
Repeat.
Keep it simple and build on your successes and, above all, make it work for you. There is no ‘one way’ to coach effectively, so just have a go and enjoy the results.
LEADING MY TEAM
- Establish with your team that you will be experimenting with a coaching style and that they can expect you to be asking more than you are telling.
- Look for every opportunity within a conversation with your team members to employ some of the techniques of coaching: deep listening, a curious mindset and open-ended questions that encourage the recipients to think for themselves.
- Keep your coaching interventions as conversational in style as you can. This is not a process as much as an entire way of demonstrating your leadership.
- When you receive a response, dig a little deeper when it seems that you can encourage further reflection and learning.
- If, ok, when things don’t quite go to plan, as will happen from time to time, do what effective coaches do and look at what your role in that outcome was and ask: what could I have done differently? How did I influence the answers that I was given? How much leading or bias did I present in the questions I asked? What will I do differently next time?
LEADING MY ORGANISATION
- Share your coaching aspirations with your peers and line manager and explain you are developing this new style to your leadership identity.
- Find someone who is equally interested in exploring the practices of ‘leader-as-coach’, commit to working together to get better and provide each other with some coaching, as required.
- Ask your line manager if you can pursue some coaching development opportunities that you can bring back to the team.
- Ask the learning and development department or HR if you can receive some coaching. There is no better way to learn how to coach well than by receiving effective coaching yourself. Both of us still receive coaching formally from other people so we can continue to develop.
- Offer to coach a junior member of staff from outside your team. They gain some free coaching whilst you get the chance to practise your skills. As a by-product the organisation wins too.
EXPLOIT STRENGTHS
44. I encourage people to exploit their strengths and manage their weaknesses. Or put another way: hire talented people and ask them to do what they do best.
Understanding what one is good for and what one therefore should try to strengthen and develop is key to self-development.
Peter Drucker
Creating a positive work environment begins by helping people focus on what they do best. In a recent UK poll conducted by The Skills Commission, one in five people questioned said they were in a job that that did not make best use of their skills, and 41% of people said they had been in that situation previously.
In an investigation into what ‘employees want from the workplace’, TalentSmoothie gathered data online from 2,521 survey participants. Their key findings included the following:
- A job that uses their strengths and includes personal development is seen as essential.
- Being allowed to use their strengths and being trusted were cited as their best experiences at work.
- Strengths-based recruitment matters.
The strengths approach starts with looking at what works and how an individual, team or business can build on this. This distinguishes the methodology from more traditional approaches to talent development that start with deficit, fixing problems or closing gaps.
Each person has a unique combination of core skills, abilities, qualities and traits that they enjoy using and can use easily. Focusing on success, what people and organisations are good at and where they have natural strengths makes sense. Focusing on success and maximising potential is recognised as the path to growth.
A positive approach does not ignore critical flaws, problems and challenges. It simply starts the conversation in a different place, which taps into people’s passions, energy and interests, that in turn fuels drive and confidence. Through focusing on their own strengths, and the strengths of others in their team, people demonstrate a more positive attitude.
Most people understand their weaknesses far better than they do their strengths, and yet it is people’s unique, personal qualities that provide energy and fuel performance. They highlight the road to mastery, confidence and achievement. It is the leader’s role to help their people understand what they are good at and help people to make the best possible contribution to the organisation’s goals.
LEADING MY TEAM
- Check that you start to review the performance of individuals through a strengths-based lens first and foremost.
- Don’t ignore critical weaknesses but seek to help people leverage their strengths to address these.
- The better you know the performance of your team and review it regularly, the better you will get to know their individual – and the team-level – strengths.
- Ask each of the team to take a strengths profile, such as Gallup Strengths-Finder or our very own Leader iD diagnostic, to help them appreciate the strengths they have. Discuss the results in a one-to-one conversation using a coaching approach.
- Share your own results from the Leader iD diagnostic to start the process of understanding and developing a strengths-based team culture.
- As part of an annual appraisal cycle, share evidence you have for the strengths each team member possesses (see Appendix). Discuss how accurate your observations have been and plan together how to use them to raise team performance. Encourage each team member to volunteer specifically for roles or tasks that maximise their strengths.
LEADING MY ORGANISATION
- Encourage peers within and beyond the organisation you work for to take a strengths-based profile such as the Leader iD diagnostic. Volunteer to chat about their results and to share your own in the spirit of seeking to improve.
- Discuss your strengths as you see them with your line manager. Check for harmony and dissonance.
- Seek a mentor who possesses great strengths in the areas that you would like to develop further and ask them to help you get better. Don’t forget these could be strengths you want to make stronger or weaknesses you want to minimise.
- Offer to mentor others in areas where you are strong.
- Design project teams to have the right blend of strengths that will be required on the project. High customer focus? Ensure there are plenty on the team with strengths in compassion, discovery and balance.
RAISE THEIR GAME
45. I take personal responsibility for helping others to raise their performance. Or put another way: if you are not helping others raise their performance, then what are you spending your time doing?
Great leaders take it upon themselves to help the people in their team to raise their performance continuously. Sounds like common sense? Yes, but in our experience, not common practice. Too often we find ourselves working with leaders who believe that growing people is the responsibility of the human resources department. When this thinking is challenged, the barriers appear to be that people just don’t see it as their job – they just don’t have time for it even if they were minded to act. Performance reviews are simply a process driven by HR and a 60% completion rate is often seen as an acceptable result.
One study we looked at suggested that 62% of millennials have felt ‘blindsided’ by their performance reviews and 74% said they feel ‘in the dark’ about how their managers and peers think they’re performing.
The most effective leaders we see make it their business to help others raise their game and see review conversations as a central part in this process. They invest in review conversations that:
- fuel performance (motivate)
- align work projects to business strategy (goals)
- identify the top performers to enable promotion and compensation (reward)
- target development activity (promote a growth mindset)
… and they engage in such conversations with a high degree of frequency.
The business of leaders at all levels is to help those in their charge develop beyond their dreams … which in turn leads to happy customers, stakeholders and communities.
Tom Peters
Leaders make it their job to help their people:
- become stronger, more confident contributors to the business goals
- develop as human beings and leaders themselves
- develop to become more valuable team members than when they first experienced your leadership.
The leader who sees their role as serving others, recognises the tremendous responsibility to do everything in their power to nurture the personal and professional growth of employees and colleagues.
LEADING MY TEAM
- Accept as part of your core identity as a leader that an important role is to develop those in your team and beyond.
- In every conversation you have with someone in your team, use the following powerful question to help you remain focused on supporting and developing them: ‘What is my role in this conversation, with this person, at this time?’ This self-directed question has worked very powerfully with hundreds of leaders who now practise it regularly.
- Asking people in your team about their level of confidence to tackle a task or deliver a stretching target can be very liberating and reassuring for them and will also tell you as the leader a lot about their current capability. Take responses to this seriously and seek to support and develop where you can.
- Regularly reviewing both outstanding performances and less successful efforts is key to driving high performance across the team. Neglect to do this regularly and you waste rich learning opportunities.
LEADING MY ORGANISATION
- Support the work and development of your peers. This is not a zero-sum game: helping others will not mean you do less well. It is not a case of if they gain one step on a ladder you have to go back one step. You both win.
- Offering your services as a mentor or coach to people beyond your team is a great way to add value to your organisation and a sign of highly developed leadership.
- Challenge under-performance wherever you observe it, then follow that up with offers of support to help make things better than they were.
- Continue to invest in developing yourself in service of others – become an increasingly good leader in order to add ever-more worthwhile value back to the organisation.
- Whenever you are asked to contribute feedback on the performance of someone else, resist the temptation to ignore it or rush your input. If you are committed to developing others, then see these opportunities as the time to provide your most considered reflections and insights. That’s what great leaders do, even when they could use the excuse of being too busy.