When planning the next step in your career, you may wonder what the main skills you can work on are. What is more important for employees? Which factors could leverage engagement and interactions and reduce turnover?
Original articles posted @Forbes
Research by MIT Sloan Management Review sheds some light on this. For example, you may be surprised that compensation ranks 16th in predicting employee turnover, while a toxic corporate culture ranks first, ten times more powerful than compensation. So how can you lead to a more collaborative and positive culture?
After working with hundreds of teams and interviewing multiple company leaders, I have found that the opposite of a toxic and “me” centric culture is a “we” centric culture. My recent book We Culture explains the 12 necessary behavioral skills to lead and collaborate in the future of work to build a We Culture in a face-to-face, remote, or hybrid workplace. Here is a summary:
Connect with your employees and teammates to drive innovation
1) Define a shared purpose and values: define purpose and values as a team. Then, internalize the rules by communicating them daily and across the entire employee experience (from hiring to departing), being a role model and sharing examples to avoid inconsistencies.
2) Nourish your network: communicate with your connections beyond your comfort zone. Be intentional about which relationships to maintain and improve. Look for different methods of communication, both synchronous and asynchronous and organize shorter but more frequent and meaningful interactions.
3) Normalize change: Accept failure as part of the innovation process, understand what went wrong and learn from it. Learn to go criticism (to you and your coworkers) to build a safe space where people can feel comfortable moving on to the next innovation.
Push attention to the front line to drive quality
4) Push decision-making to the front line. Support experimenting and learning where the action takes place at the front line, redirecting attention to improving, not blaming.
Share data, not opinions, to facilitate transparency and sound decision-making. Create a safe space for your employees to propose, decide and succeed or make mistakes, and be available when they ask for help.
5) Support team in understanding and defining their own metrics. Understand and share results, monitor and verify them as a team. As a result, employees will know better and detect faster what requires attention in their processes.
6) Learn to manage risks by listening: support the team in sensing and communicating risks and threats. By identifying and analyzing problems productively as a team, potential failures can be anticipated, incorporating lessons learned and resetting your relationship with failure.
Respect the different needs and characteristics of the team members to drive engagement
7) Build empathetic one-on-one relationships: Increase engagement by customizing your leadership style to the specific needs of each team member through one-on-one conversations. Knowing and empathizing with each individual helps build relationships based on trust and honesty, where feedback does not equal frustration but growth.
8) Promote team psychological safety: Build an environment where team members can collaborate, ask questions and be disruptive without being dismissed as ignorant. To engage safely, they must feel confident that no one will embarrass them for admitting a mistake, asking a question, providing constructive feedback or offering a crazy idea.
9) Embrace diversity, equality and inclusion: Respect and focus on the strengths of your coworkers by building diverse teams where everyone feels they have equal opportunities to succeed. Different people with different profiles, points of view, and knowledge are the fuel that can take a company above and beyond
Empower employees to act in a self-organized way to drive agility
10) Promote autonomy. Foster individual responsibility while you learn to give away control.
11) Encourage team routines: support your team in developing team routines, such as standardizing how you organize team meetings to collaborate more efficiently. For example, you can define baseline standards like recording all sessions, using online tools to share ideas and agreeing always to send agendas and minutes.
12) Build self-organizing habits: Build an environment where employees get things done with minimum direct supervision through visual management, 5S, lean and agile methods.
Choose one of the four dimensions (connection, attention, respect or empowerment) where you feel the more comfortable initiating change, and focus on improving those three skills. These skills will help create a more positive culture based on conscious teamwork to increase employee engagement, agility, quality, and innovation.
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