By Brenda Blom
6 Ways to Increase Your Team Effectiveness
1. Eliminate your blind spots. What you don’t see, can hurt your team. Learn how others view you. Create a team culture of psychological safety where feedback is welcome daily. Take personality and leader style assessments and learn all you can from the results, including a 360 review. Sometimes we’re blind to what others see every day. Stress can prevent us from being conscious of our own beliefs and actions. Mindfulness exercises can help us act rather than react.
2. Increase your strengths. What makes you tick? Learn all you can about your own personality and leadership style. Find out what are your strengths, and how you can leverage them to solve problems, manage your stress and communicate more effectively. Everything stems from building trust through our personal ability to manage ourselves and our relationships; so, use your strengths to help you.
3. Master your micro-communication skills. Are you pushing the boundaries of both asserting and learning while staying curious? Without knowledge and training it is easy to fall into biases and to create defensiveness in others without realizing it. First, we have to build self-awareness to improve how we “show up” to enable better choices in how we choose to relate with others. Trust is more possible too when we have built personal relationships with co-workers. Knowing each other on a deeper level helps us understand each other and makes us more motivated to communicate when times are strained.
We are taught to show our best side at work and cover up mistakes. The problem is that when we do, we cover up our human side. Being vulnerable at work is almost an oxymoron. It is contrary to everything about what we’ve been taught about being successful. “Don’t let them see you sweat” is a message ingrained in us. How can we show others that we are capable and human at work?
4. Foster your curiosity. Avoid falling into the mind traps of making assumptions. A competitive mindset kills teams. Reaching out and sharing feels risky and leads to working in silos. Working in a team can be much harder than working alone. How do you embrace this challenge by creating a growth mindset?
5. Eliminate your limiting beliefs. We all have stories that trip us up and repeatedly get in our way. Are you aware of your stories and how it prevents you from being curious? How do you sidestep them to be your best? The problem is that we are each locked inside our own head, we don’t understand how we come across to others. First, we must build self-awareness to improve how we “show up” to enable better choices in how we choose to relate with others.
6. Practice self-development as a team. Although self-awareness is key, it obviously does no one any good without acting on the awareness. Self-development is a lifelong journey. Create ways to embrace self-development as a team. The team is only as strong as the weakest link, so help each other to be your best selves. You may need a leadership consultant to learn the tools together but then practice using them as a team and make self-development part of your team’s secret sauce.
Contact me to schedule a consult to find out about my coaching, assessment tools and self-development workshops.
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