The Greatest Gift You Can Give Your Team
As a leader, it can be tempting to think that things like team buildings, dinners or even gifts are what you team needs to be productive, fulfilled, and motivated. You may even consider perks like free lunches, gym memberships or training to be important.
And for some people this may very well be important.
I would argue that there is an even bigger gift that you can and should be focused on giving your employees.
Before looking at the greatest gift you can give your employees, I would like to set the scene a little for you.
The Social Impact
I’m pretty sure that most of us have “covid fatigue” and no longer want to entertain conversations about the pandemic. But this remains an important social context for all of us. While the world’s medical resources may have the contagion “under control” and we are largely “back to normal”, there is a new normal.
Contained in this new normal are elements like social interactions, the impact of flexible and remote work, not to mention the economic instability that has resulted in the layoffs we’ve been seeing recently through the tech industry.
The pandemic brought us the skills, capabilities, and tools to work remotely and thereby freeing us from being office-bound overall. However, my fear is that this pandemic also stilted our social skills.
We became cocooned in our own realms. We met in the virtual world. We ordered our groceries and essentials online. We had to reduce our social interactions to those we are the closest to, both physically and relationally. We wore masks that covered our faces, so we stopped being able to read facial body language. Between Zoom meetings and masks, we were prohibited from reading body language. And we know that more than 55% of what we say on non-verbal. So, we lost more than half of the normal social cues.
Like any skill, social skills are honed through the practice of being in social environments. So, while we may have been physically keeping ourselves safe during covid, there may be a need to focus on social skill development much more thoughtfully.
The Interdependencies Continue
At the same time, we know that no-one succeeds at work by focusing on themselves. Very few people can deliver a final product, service, or deliverable by themselves. There are interdependencies in almost all work output. Knowing how to work well with and through others is an increasingly important skill.
The rapid pace of technological advancement means we need to work together better, faster, and deeper than ever before. While at the same time we navigate flexible work arrangements and managing remote and physical work with the accompanying complexities. All while “re-learning” deep social skills that covid took from us during our isolation and mask wearing times.
Self-Awareness Breeds Success
This may be a dollar short and a day late, but I think it is more important than ever that we consider carefully how we continually develop our social skills.
At the heart of social skills is our personal awareness.
Deep personal awareness will enable us as individual, teams, and businesses to move forward individually and collectively to success. Personal, relational, and situational success relies on exquisite self-awareness and profound curiosity.
One of the biggest gifts you can give your team is the gift of self-awareness – for you and for them.
This means helping them to understand themselves. Working on their values, their beliefs, their barriers, their obstacles, their dreams, and visions for their lives.
Along the way as they are re-introduced to ourselves we become more internally aligned.
Then working on understanding others. How each of us impact other people and the situations we find ourselves in. How we communicate. How we create shared meaning. How we navigate complex situations, change and conflict that occur in interpersonal circumstances.
While this is part of the greatest gift you can give your employees, there is another layer to this in which the role of the leader is a critical component.
The Leader’s Role
Your role as the leader here is to focus on becoming the coaching leader, or leader with a coaching mindset.
This means:
Listening more than talking
Curiosity based questioning to deepen understanding
Judgement free inquiry to create greater clarity
Less providing answers and more building effective solution building skills in others
Respectful and direct challenge to identify and overcome obstacles
Managing your own state through each interaction
As you can see, it’s not about doing more or less work, if’s about getting the work done differently, more intentionally. It’s about developing those who work for and with you. It’s about creating capabilities far beyond what is technically required to get one job done.
It’s about building eminently transferable skills that will not support innovation but also create career security for your team members. This is the greatest gift you can give your employees.
The Very Real Benefits
From a business perspective, the benefits of a coaching approach are well documented and include:
Improved productivity – studies have shown a 45% improvement in employees’ willingness to go “the extra mile”. And productivity improvements have a significant impact on net income. If you assume that salary costs are 50% of company costs, then:
10% productivity improvement = 100% pre-tax profit improvement
5% productivity improvement = 50% pre-tax profit improvement
Greater engagement – there is a causal linear relationship between coaching effectiveness and employee engagement
Improved retention – employees who receive effective coaching state a 63% reduction in their intention to leave the company.
Given the annual cost of $1 trillion associated with employee turnover in the US alone, any intervention that reduces turnover will positively impact the bottom line.
Employee development – when employees feel that they are provided with the opportunities to develop their skills, engagement improves and increases productivity and reduces turnover.
Improved perceived supervisor effectiveness – employees who received effective coaching feel much more positive about their immediate supervisor or manager which also improves engagement and reduces turnover
For individuals, there are different yet related benefits. These include:
Improved self-awareness, resilience, and optimism
Improved inter-personal skills such as communication, collaboration, managing conflict
Better work-life integration and more effective approaches to handling stress
Increased mental health
More job satisfaction, productivity, and engagement
In this fast-changing world, where we see businesses restructuring and reducing headcount, there is an additional benefit to individuals.
This is arguably the greatest gift that you can give your team members.
It is a solid base of transferable social skills that will enable them to feel more secure in their role, regardless of the company they work for and the position they hold.
Making The Change
The benefits of coaching for organisations extends beyond the short-term delivery of improved results. The coaching framework and process provides real benefits for individuals within the organisation that strengthen their own abilities. This creates an empowered, resilient, focused and motivated work-force that will drive the business forwards into future success.
Strengthening your skill to operate within the coaching leadership style does not mean that you don’t access other leadership styles and approaches. There may be times and situations when more directive leadership is required. But the point is that in most situations that face you as a leader every day, your ability to adopt a coaching approach will deliver better business results and improve employee experience.
Just like learning any new skill, you cannot expect to start being a coaching leader without practice. You need new knowledge, new tools and techniques and the confidence to be able to practice this new way of leading.
Of course, it helps if you’ve experienced coaching for yourself.
Regardless of how you do it, it’s time to include coaching skills as part of toolkit of leadership capabilities.
Are you ready to make the change?
