Refining Your Team

Your plan for success relies on doing the extra discovery and administrative tasks that will reveal the good and bad about your team and its members. You manage your team's interaction by determining how people are connected, and how they connect, and taking advantage of the information you find. Great leaders can help people see themselves personally and professionally so they can answer four important, initial questions. How much control do you think you have over organizational actions? Do you have personal, fundamental conflicts with organizational actions? Do you know what work you should do next and why? Does the team provide room for you to grow? These are tough questions that could deliver uncomfortable answers for the team and its members. But the answers are crucial to having an open and honest dialogue that leads to an effective plan.

Empowering Leaders With Tools

This chapter presents what I call “Tools for Leaders.” The tools are vision, analysis, training, motivation, and stress reduction. Effective leaders apply them to their advantage. Vision is an end state that serves as a guide for choosing courses of action for the organizational or personal effort. Analysis is dissecting the whole into its parts so that you can study the mechanism. Training is acquiring knowledge, skills, or competencies in various ways to improve performance, productivity, and/or capability. Motivation is getting someone to do something they may or may not do on their own, causing them to act by initiating, guiding, or maintaining goal-oriented behaviors. Stress management requires analyzing stressors and taking action to mitigate their effects.

Sensemaking Theory

The social activity of decoding messages by drawing upon a common language and managing the actions in which we engage is the focus of sensemaking theory (Brown, 2017). A social context of sharing ideas and influencing how others make sense of events is enhanced by creating trusting relationships. Leaders apply this theory through connected communications and structured reinforcement. Connected communications are face-to-face, routine discussions with your team members dealing with what they are doing, why they are doing it, and how they decided on their activity. On-demand training, real-time results, ongoing recognition, and reinforcement tied to specific actions form the basis of structured reinforcement. Success lies in determining whether a person's right-now actions are value-plus or value-minus. The social activity of decoding messages by drawing upon a common language and managing the actions in which we engage is the focus of sensemaking theory. A social context of sharing ideas and influencing how others make sense of events is enhanced by creating trusting relationships. Leaders apply this theory through connected communications and structured reinforcement. Connected communications are face-to-face, routine discussions with your team members dealing with what they are doing, why they are doing it, and how they decided on their activity. On-demand training, real-time results, ongoing recognition, and reinforcement tied to specific actions form the basis of structured reinforcement. Success lies in determining whether a person's right-now actions are value-plus or value-minus.

Defining Your Team

Effective leaders define the roles of each team member (Figure 1) – Leader, Manager, and Team Member – because there is an understanding that everyone might fill any of the roles at one time or another. This movement into other roles can happen for a variety of reasons, and it might be actually assigned as in the case of a promotion, or it could happen as part of problem solving or training situation. Great leaders find the common benefit to the organization and the person where possible. The Leader should also keep in mind that the Manager may have the toughest job because of the need to adjust to all roles. Managers must be the glue that holds everyone together.

Planning for Success

Now that the tough questions have been asked and answered, role players need a plan for success. That plan will have flexibility, adaptability, and relevance to everything the organization does. The plan is a tool that will come in handy for years to come. A plan states the means a person or an organization will use to reach the objectives. It is a framework that details the method and tasks involved in achieving the goal. Effective leaders use strategic planning skills to move from the present to the future. Strategic planning considers the basic nature (mission) and direction (strategy) of an organization. The process involves deciding on objectives and the general methods that can be used to achieve these objectives.

Communication Accommodation Theory

Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) allows us to manage our personal and social identities. According to the theory, people adjust speech, vocal patterns, and gestures to help promote mutual understanding in communication (Gallois & Giles, 2015). CAT helps us examine how to emphasize or minimize the differences between ourselves and others during verbal and non-verbal interactions. Language, context, identity, and intergroup and interpersonal factors are used in this theory to make interaction adjustments. Interpersonal control, interpretability, discourse management, and emotional expression are CAT strategies. There are also several supporting approaches that can help manage communication and adjust to receiver reaction including organizational dynamics, active listening, developing the leader within, style diversity, and ongoing self-assessment. The chapter concludes with information on building individual and team trust.

Motivationally Intelligent Leadership

This chapter sets the stage to build Motivationally Intelligent Leadership. We start with Emotional Intelligence (EI) to build leaders who recognize and employ their own emotions to conduct quality interactions with others. Leaders identify the value available to each party and then use two-way communication to get buy-in. Engaged interaction is defined as employing flexible, full-range communications to ensure that both, or all, parties listen, hear, and understand. This concept requires that all parties continue the interaction until management and team-building objectives are satisfied. EI and engaged interaction allow leaders to conduct effective communication with the team. Getting to know yourself and your team helps your ability to be impartial and listen for ideas, not just words.

Understanding Teams and Your People

Great leaders set the bar at a very high level by getting out front, setting the standard, making decisions, and either willing or convincing people to follow and achieve. They successfully focus on satisfying needs and taking care of people with integrity. If you satisfy people's needs, there will be performance benefits. If you can't satisfy needs, create an environment or a process by which this can be done. The latter part of this chapter focuses on achieving dynamic change, which is a continuous and productive activity that departs from accepted or traditional courses of action.