There is no better time than in the beginning of the year (yes, NOW!) to help your team realign with company vision, renew their strength and start making meaningful progress together.
And I get it. Leaders are also human, and we all have finite energy. Perhaps you are resuming from strings of celebrations and still feeling tired; Even though you aspire to make this year a great one, but once you tackle the inbox, slack messages and unfinished tasks you meant to finish before the end of last year, it is just natural to feel daunting.
And it’s okay. Because true leadership is about enabling the full potential of others. In other words, you’re in charge of creating the environment that can empower your team to deliver their best for the love of the people and the mission they have signed up to serve.
You’re here to create a WHOLE greater than the sum of its parts. Peter Drucker, the guru of the gurus, said it best:
“Leadership is the lifting of a man’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a man’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a man’s personality beyond its normal limitations.”
So the question becomes, what can you do to help your team start well in this new year?
Here are the 3 steps you can take. These suggestions may come across as simple, but they are not easy. Remember, “nothing good is ever easy”, but I can assure you they are worth it.
1) Make time for gratitude and recognition
Start with yourself
Give yourself some love! Give yourself a pat in the back, say “Good job! Look at your progress and learning achieved in the past year. You’ve become a better version of yourself!”
Think about why you are grateful for your company, your boss, and your team members. (Never take all these for granted). It is an important retrospective because you first need to admit something is good before you can respond with gratitude.
Communicate your gratitude
When expressing your gratitude to others, look people in the eye, get specific, and say it slowly. Consider doing it in public. Don’t let the thought of feeling embarrassed stop you from this important communication. Because appreciation matters and your team members deserve them.
2) Help team to build empathy with first-hand customer stories
Get out of the building
Rule #1 in UX (User Experience) is “Get out of the building”. Because it is critical to first understand the jobs-to-be-done, the problem, the goal & the context of your users before pouring out resources into building a “solution”.
Many developers, while working hard on delivering a feature, have this constant voice nagging on the back of their heads, “Would this feature ever get used?” Marty Cagan, author of Inspired , argues, “If you’re just using your engineers to code, you’re only getting about half their value.” We hate to see this kind of waste, don’t we?
Power of Empathy & Customer obsession
Beginning of the year is a great time to help your team members to get in touch with your customers. Use the expertise of your UX team to plan the customer interview and discovery sessions. Your UX lead can work with team members to co-create learning objectives and lead the interviews. Everyone, including the team members who prefer to take a passive role as observers, would come back engaged, because they will be owning a first-hand story of the users they have visited and interviewed.
If you’re not sure how you can do this for your team, contact me and I’ll show you how.
3) Provide a Safe Space for team’s co-creation
We need both Top-down and Bottom-up
As a new year begins, business strategy and goals are being announced and communicated by top management. These goals and strategy result from thorough analysis and multi-facet discussion, therefore it is natural for leaders to believe these alone are sufficient for their teams to march on with clarity.
The truth is, there is always a big gap between the top-down business goals and a fully aligned execution plan which needs to come from bottom-up. You need to help your team to own the action plan.
Many teams are being told the ‘What’ in the goals, but never given a safe space for them to ask questions about the “what”, let alone to discuss the “why”. It’s also very common for individual contributors to find top-down ‘goals and strategy’ too remote, because they are asked to work on delivering more features according to the backlog. ‘Outcomes’ are irrelevant, because they are asked to focus on ‘outputs’ only.
Nurture a high-performing team that cares about both outputs and outcomes
A high-performance team delivers results, not merely releases. You need to create that safe space that encourages your team members to raise questions, challenge assumptions, suggest “shaky” ideas, and even admit mistakes, without the risk of being treated unkindly by anyone.
Structured Team Workshop
In the old days in which everything was nice and calm, an anonymous survey could be a good start. Now the world is turbulent and competitive, and we need to take a much more powerful approach: Structured Team Workshop. Invest 2 to 3 half-day for business & team alignment, opportunity mapping, outcome-driven backlog planning.
When I work with my clients, I design custom team workshops combining the best elements from human-centered design, Google design sprint and agile development. The outcome is a super engaged team who executes and owns their action plan, which effectively contributes to customers and business success.
Let’s do it
There you have it:
- Gratitude & recognition
- Build empathy with first-hand customer stories
- Provide Safe Space for team’s co-creation
Make good use of this time of the year, start nurturing a high-performance team.
If you have any questions or feedback, I would love to hear from you. Feel free to comment or send me a message.
All the best to you and your team in this new year!
