Counter-intuitive ways to engage your team and accelerate development.
Increase the impact of the time you invest in team development.
As your team and business grow, high-leverage investments of your time and energy become essential. You have a business to run, people to manage, customers to serve, results to deliver, fires to put out, strategic objectives to track and a list of things you could spend time on that grows by the day. What if you could get three benefits — a “three-fer” — from the time you invest in team development?
Think of it as a “team flywheel.” Similar to stationary bikes in spin classes, it takes more energy to get the flywheel going than to keep it moving. Momentum builds and it spins faster with less effort and doesn’t come to a grinding halt the moment we stop.
One example of the flywheel effect is represented by the Orrin Woodward quote, “Average leaders raise the bar on themselves; good leaders raise the bar for others; great leaders inspire others to raise their own bar.”
Here are three ways to get your “Team Flywheel” moving while inspiring your team to raise their own bar.
1. Start team meetings with a “Highlight Reel” reflection.
This may feel counterintuitive, and even counterculture, and like the flywheel, it may take greater effort to get started. We often define “adding value” through a problem-solving lens and develop strengths in finding and resolving defects. Reward systems reinforce this problem-focused mindset and further limit our perspective. Notice the reactive nature of this strength. Like the adage of only having a hammer so all we see is nails, the problem must exist before we add value.
The more senior our leadership role, the more vital our ability to develop pro-active strengths and the finesse to adapt our approach to the circumstances. Insights from sports psychology are one example. Evidence-based research in the field of neuroscience, as highlighted in the HBR article (registration required) “The Feedback Fallacy”, is another, as is the Appreciative Inquiry work of David Cooperrider. David’s site features this quote by renowned management consultant Peter Drucker, “The ageless essence of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths in ways that make a system’s weaknesses irrelevant.”
Imagine your “Team Flywheel” focused on finding, aligning and building on emerging strengths within the “system” of your business while mitigating problems, versus being primarily focused on (and rewarded for) solving problems. Role modeling this behavior and building on the growing momentum create a virtuous cycle.
Experiment: Open team meetings with a five- to ten-minute “highlight reel” reflection. To get the flywheel moving, you may need to bring two to three examples yourself, or pre-seed examples via individual team members and amplify their comments. Notice and build on signs your team is generating and building on their momentum.
2. Initiate “Practice Tapes” focus areas.
Professional athletes select focused practices to improve performance over time. Defining a deliberate practice and sharing this in a team setting is a powerful way to collectively generate further growth, collaboration, and performance.
Team members select individual development goals, such as “be a more persuasive presenter”, or an area related to Team Norms, such as to be a “more effective collaborator” or “attentive listener”. Some teams create hybrid of “Appreciative Inquiry” and Jim Collins’ “Good to Great” approaches and identify strengths to build from good to great.
Imagine a team member adept at spotting and developing talent electing to build this into a “signature strength.” Team members are more likely to tap them when making high stakes hires, which increases the likelihood of a strong hire, builds their relationship and engages their peers in helping the new team member to succeed.
Experiment: Model this by selecting a strength to build from good to great or a blind spot to overcome. Share your focus with your team and solicit individual ideas via your one-on-one sessions; what “great” will look like, or what those with this strength do differently. Select one or two ideas to experiment with, share these experiments and welcome their continued ideas and feedback. Invite them to do the same and use your “Highlight Reel” to notice and build on observed progress.
3. Facilitate “Game Tapes” reflections.
A professional athletic team practices together between games. This often includes reviewing game tapes to clarity what went well and what needs the most improvement. Team meetings can likewise be leveraged as team practice. This requires flexing our focus between the scorecard (outputs) to also reflect on inputs; what made key outcomes possible, or what stalled progress. A leadership team can likewise create deliberate practices within the team setting to further experiment and improve before applying learnings to their next high-stakes setting.
This includes reflecting on “performances”, such as team presentations, strategic planning and budget reviews, and how team members are collaborating and coordinating day-to-day to drive collective business results.
Experiment: Facilitate regular team reflections to include what went well (“plus” column), and what needs refinement (“delta” column). For deficit-focused teams, have examples ready for the “plus” column. If nothing went well, challenge yourself to find something to build on, such as how they handled defeat (sportsmanship), how they redoubled their efforts (mindset, grit, resilience), or how they avoided the blame game and chose to pull together, instead.
Imagine the exponential benefits as your team implements these approaches with their teams. Keep the flywheel moving by noticing and acknowledging both anecdotal and quantitative progress over time.
