Creating the right conditions

Welcome to What Else Is Possible?, a biweekly newsletter that explores what it means to be a modern leader. Together, we’ll uncover personal and professional opportunities for growth, allowing you to leave your unique mark on the world. 

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How effective is your team? 

If you’re unsure, ask yourselves these questions: Are you collaborating successfully? Respecting each other’s diverse opinions and skill sets? Are you innovating? Are you making deadlines? Does your team have direction, or do they seem a little lost? 

If your answers leave a little to be desired, your team may need a push to be successful. While you can’t always control the challenges they will face, you can provide them with conditions that help them overcome.

For a quick take on creating the right team conditions, check out this video! 

Set transparent expectations

If you want your team to maximize productivity, accuracy, and efficacy, they need to understand what’s expected of them. Clarity, context and alignment are crucial to defining roles, responsibilities, and even reward systems. When you sit down to level-set, start by clearly communicating the organization’s vision and goals at a macro level. Then you can break it down to the micro, drilling down on the part they play in executing on deliverables. As you begin to set expectations, it’s important to provide them with context. Knowing the “why” allows for greater commitment to the work, the team, and to reaching the goal.  The “why” is more important than the “what.”

While it is important to be clear on your expectations, allowing for feedback and dialogue from your team will enable you to identify potential gaps and opportunities. Come to your team with your own ideas, then ask for their expectations. What they come up with may surprise you. They may be ready to tackle problems you hadn’t considered or complete projects you thought were unattainable or unrealistic. When people take ownership of their careers, they’ll accomplish far more than any assigned task list. 

Make room for growth

Recent research shows that turnover increases when employees do not have opportunities to learn new things or don’t find their work interesting or challenging. If you expect your team to stay in the same place for years without growth opportunities, friction is bound to occur. In order to retain great people, show them how to grow and learn, then deliver on your promises. When you’re tactical about creating a culture of opportunity, team satisfaction abounds.

Work with your team to determine each individual’s strengths, goals, and interests. As you move forward, this allows you to offer the right opportunities to the right people. When providing an opportunity, remember that there is more than one way to achieve a goal. Focus instead on the desired outcome, cultivating the right resources, training, and authority to reach the end goal. Empower your team to experiment with their ideas and test new approaches. If you’ve compiled the right group, you should feel secure in awarding them that freedom.

Deploy flexibility

As leaders, it can be easy to get tunnel vision. Sometimes we focus on one solution or initiative so much that we can’t see that it’s no longer the best option. Being able to pivot from one idea to another - and to determine when it’s right to do so - is an essential leadership skill. With the rapid change brought on by the events of the last three years, flexibility is more crucial than ever. To set up the right conditions for your team, you’ll need to look inward and hone this necessary skill. 

To pivot successfully, you’ll first have to recognize when the need to course correct arises. Be real with yourself when determining what needs to change; crisis is not the time for defensiveness, even if what’s not working was your idea. Ignoring hard data, hoping for a miracle, or shifting blame just impedes progress. If you cannot clearly see what’s going on, tap into your best resource: your team. Like everything else I’ve mentioned here, you need to engage them to create the right conditions. Your people may be able to see your blind spots and to provide valuable insight and solutions. Go outside of your milieu to get a bird’s-eye view from another colleague or mentor. 

Like success in our personal lives, business success largely comes down to choices. Once you’ve identified what needs to change, don’t be afraid to change course. Develop a new plan of action, and remain flexible and objective. When you can shift as your needs and situations change, you provide your team with the conditions they need to do their best work. 

What else is possible? 

A single moment can change the course of our life or career. If we look closely, I believe we can see these moments of possibility as they emerge. I call these “What Else” moments, the moments that allow us to see a vision of what’s possible. When these What Else moments connect, tangible and sustainable growth is within reach. With that in mind, I want you to consider this question: 

What else is possible when you set your team up for success? 

New ideas and diverse outlooks are what inspires me, so let’s talk! Let me know what you think in the comments. 

Are you ready to discover what else is possible? Contact me here to start the conversation.

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