Energize Your Team During Relentless Pressure

Leadership Coaching Notes MAY 2010

Energize Your Team During Relentless Pressure

Is your team struggling with ever-increasing workloads, changing targets, fewer people to do the work and shorter deadlines (read “more crises?”) Are service and quality suffering? Theresa meets these threats with a winning combination of 3 leadership practices that keep her team’s spirit, productivity and tenacity strong. How well are you using her trifecta for success?

What Worked:

1.    Keep Successes Front and Center: Theresa fuels her team with good news. They not only hear about their own progress and wins, she searches out examples of company successes, other teams’ progress and how others bounced back from tough setbacks. Facing the demands for high-productivity, she’s learned success can inspire more success.

What You Can Do: Start Meetings with Accomplishments: Find and share examples of positive financial, customer, community, and innovative progress. Highlight their positive impacts on your team. Give people reasons to feel proud, optimistic and determined. Then, watch your people sit taller as they feel part of making positive differences.

Use a Rosebud File: Theresa keeps a personal folder with good news. She calls it “Rosebud.” Focusing on her own successes equips her to inspire others’ confidence and optimism.

2. Protect Their Backs: Having learned the impact of being thrown under the bus by one boss, Theresa walks extra miles to make her team members’ lives easier. She blocks unnecessary demands and low priority meetings. She is a warrior when it comes to finding an extra resource or negotiating timelines so they endure fewer late nights at work.

What You Can Do: Reverse the Golden Rule: If you don’t want it done to you, assure it doesn’t happen to your team. Good people want to do a great job. Protect them from:

• Disruptive clients or peers
• Time-wasting bureaucracy
• Heedless changes in goals
• New priorities without relief from current ones
• Pointing fingers of blame.  Take them yourself

You can’t save your team from all harm, but they’ll be uplifted when you do your best.

Keep Personally Strong: Strengthen your credibility. Stay on top of facts so you can argue from strength when you need to negotiate with powers beyond your team. Tap deep sources of courage so you can influence or stand up to disruptive people. Build strong relationships proactively so others respect you when you battle for your team. Strong preparation, courage and relationships benefit you and them.

3. Use Positive Peer Pressure: Even when it seems faster and simpler to talk on the fly with individual team members, Theresa prioritizes team lunches and short team meetings. She assures everyone knows the team’s shared goals. She clarifies publicly what each person will deliver and asks what help they need.

The following week she reviews the team’s and each one’s contributions. When all agree on goals, accountabilities and to review their performance in public, the positive peer pressure stays high.

Theresa sets team competitions to surpass old standards or beat a competitor. Within the team, she stresses mutual support and fast learning so the team wins together. No one wants to be the weak link.

What You Can Do: Structure Peer Pressure for Yourself: Choose a small group that will provide relentless support and keep you accountable for achieving your most important priorities. Meet regularly to set goals, review performance against goals and take in support so you become a model for winning in the face of relentless demands.

Business Impact:

Over the past years, relentless cutbacks created a unprecedented pace for those remaining. As companies begin to accelerate out of the curve, growth strains resources again. Relentless seems the new normal. Using these three strategies together and consistently keeps Theresa’s team proud of its high performance and delivering with unique quality, volume, and pride most of the time.

What’s Next:

If you or a leader you develop would like to explore new options for focusing, engaging and raising performance of your teams, I welcome a call. If you have additional success practices to share, I welcome hearing those as well. Email me at mkimbell@corporateadventure.com.

Please join us on Corporate Adventure’s new page www.facebook.com/CorporateAdventure for daily thoughts that can support your success!

All the best,

Meredith Kimbell
Executive Advisor,Strategy Consultant
Corporate Adventure

Leadership Coaching Notes uses real or composite client examples drawn from 25 years of coaching and consulting with leaders committed to solving their toughest personal, interpersonal and organizational issues.
Unless otherwise attributed, all material is copyrighted by Meredith Kimbell © 2011. All rights reserved. You may reprint any or all of this material if you include the following:
“Leadership Coaching Notes © 2011 Meredith Kimbell, Corporate Adventure, Reston, VA. Used with permission.”