3 Tips to get Your Team to Follow
Posted on December 25, 2011 by Steve Goranson, One of Thousands of Business Coaches on Noomii.
If you are not getting your desired response from your team, you need to look at how you are communicating your information. Here's 3 tips to help
As the owner of your company or manager of your department have you ever looked back and noticed that no one is following?
Have you ever wondered why your employees are not on the same page or do you keep asking yourself why don’t they ever do what you ask?
Here are 3 tips be a leader and get your team to follow…
1. Communicate Effectively
To be a good leader, you must first be a good communicator. If you can’t communicate your vision and goals as well as the rules of the game of how to get there, you will find yourself asking the above questions. When leading others we must remember that true communication is the response that we get. This is important so I’m going to repeat it; true communication is the response that we get.
If you are not getting your desired response from your team, you need to look at how you are communicating your information. Are you communicating too fast, too slow, or do you just assume that they understand your point and then move on to the next point. I coached a business owner that in communications with his team, he should pause to make sure his team understood what he wanted before he went onto the next subject. Implementing this simple strategy improved his team’s effectiveness and his business’s profitability tremendously. This seems so simple but it usually the simple things that get unnoticed.
So you might be saying to yourself, “I am communicating effectively. I am clear and to the point as to what I ask of them, but they still don’t do what I say”. That might be true. You need to understand that not all communication is verbal.
2. Lead by example
There is a saying that you must lead by example. Are you doing or acting in a way that you want your team to act? In past I have had some bosses that would tell me to do one thing and then I would see them do the opposite. How serious do you think I took their instructions? I’m might have started out doing what they asked, but as I saw that they didn’t take their instructions seriously, I didn’t either.
3. Be Congruent
The bottom line is we need to be congruent as leaders. Are you trying to build a positive and motivated team, but then turn around and start speaking negatively about others or how bad business is or how unfairly you’ve been treated?
To “BE” a leader, you must “DO” things that leaders do and then you will “HAVE” the things that leaders have. You must first work on your own belief system and change into the person you want to “BE” and then you will be the type of person that others will want to follow. They will see the changes in how you act, in how you behave and the decisions that you make. By your actions you soon will create a desire in others to follow your lead. Success is contagious. People are automatically attracted to successful people.
You will begin to see that your success will be theirs and their success will be yours. A true definition of a successful team is everyone sharing in each others success. If you would walk into a meeting of a successful team you should find it hard to figure out who the real leader is. A true leader is not about “me” it’s about “us”. As Zig Ziglar would say, the secret to success is that you can only get what you want by helping others get what they want.
