Overcome 16 Team Challenges that will unlock and empower your leadership team to move away from the status quo and into a world-class leadership mindset—challenging, yes. But not impossible. If you want to change your results, you must start with behavior change.
Behavior change is essential to personal and professional growth. We say it all the time. If you want to change your results, you must change your behaviors. When you raise the level of emotional intelligence in your organization to capitalize on these changes, you empower your leadership team to operate at a world-class level.
Think about it. Have you ever been in a meeting where a decision was emotionally triggered? I bet you wished you knew what triggered the outburst. Why couldn't there have been a more thoughtful process to decide? If these thoughts have crossed your mind, you've recognized the need to raise the level of emotional intelligence on your team.
So, what does it look like for leaders to operate on all cylinders? It boils down to 2 critical differentiators:
How they make decisions
How they solve problems
Behavior change is a commitment to personal growth that never really ends. Your actions change when your way of thinking changes. This is a constant process. There are team challenges that get in the way.
These changes are not for the faint of heart. It requires a commitment to excellence.
We have the tools to set you up for greater success.
Hiring Team Challenges: What Behaviors Do We Want?
1. How do you attract the people you want to hire?
Hiring is one of the most significant catalysts for consistent growth in any industry. Your team challenges likely begin and end with the hiring process. Many leaders spend time, money, and energy attracting people with specific credentials and experience without factoring in the behavioral and cultural fit of potential hires with the current team.
The reality is this.
Most teams hire for credentials and experience and fire for behavior issues.
You don't have to fall into the category of most teams, and it starts with attracting the type of person you want on your team. When honing in on the behaviors that elevate your culture and contribute to successful outcomes, you will overcome the team challenges that hold you back from the results you long to see.
2. Sharpen your interview skills.
When interviewing new hires, you may feel your back is against a wall, like your prospective hire holds all the cards. If so, you must lean into different interview styles that provide tangible feedback for your organization's desired behaviors. These go beyond the knowledge and skills you're looking to actualize on your team.
Knowledge and skills are more easily taught, but behaviors take time. Change is possible, but aligning the behaviors you're looking for on the front end of the hiring process will set your team up for success more quickly. It will create less unhealthy friction during the teaming process.
3. Making your selection.
Once you've attracted the right people to the right seat in your organization, it's time to decide. The PDP ProScan helps you compile strategic behavioral questions and effective marketing language to help set your decision up for success. When you have these tools at your disposal, you will be confident that you are making the right decision with data as a piece of your decision-making process. The best leaders, what we call world-class leaders, separate themselves from all the rest by how they make decisions and how they solve problems.
Ensure you are poised to make the best decisions for your team by tapping into the best information to support your efforts.
Retention, Management, and Leadership Team Challenges
How do you set expectations to capture the hearts and minds of your people to overcome leadership team challenges together? It begins with a commitment to managing and leading well. Retention requires leaders to lean into discomfort, get comfortable being uncomfortable, and build relationships that last over the long haul.
4. Motivating employees.
If you've been around an effective leader, I'm willing to bet they understood the power of motivation. They inspired you to go the extra mile on their behalf or on behalf of the people around you. Not everyone is motivated the same way. For some, it may be connections and collaboration. For others, it may be swift results that hit the bottom line. Others may be fueled by delivering exceptional quality. Leaders play a crucial role in developing others by tapping into motivators and, perhaps on a deeper level, the purpose of individuals.
It's essential to recognize that this should never come from a place of manipulation. Motivation is coming alongside others and assembling the puzzle to form a more beautiful picture. Motivating others is about setting people up for greater joy by aligning their strengths with their tasks. This should reduce dread and increase a sense of integrity as alignment with purpose increases over time.
5. Measuring stress and morale.
It's no coincidence that one of the challenges leaders confront is measuring stress and its effects on team morale. It isn't easy to recognize burnout, but there are warning signs to look for regularly.
In the video below, InitiativeOne CEO Tracy Johnson explores how to recognize burnout as a leader.
Recognizing burnout can encourage your team to recharge before it's too late. Most leaders wait to recharge when the gas tank is empty. This isn't effective. This isn't leadership. Leaders who value people at their best will emphasize the need to recharge. The PDP ProScan provides leaders with tangible data on where they and their team are feeling stress. This helps determine adjustments, understand where to focus energy, and know when to take time to reset.
6. Understanding your Leadership Style.
Do you know your leadership style?
How do you operate when you're at your best? What about when you're under an intense amount of pressure?
Understanding your strengths will give you a deeper focus on the work that best matches your behaviors. With the PDP ProScan, you will understand how the four pillars of Dominance, Extroversion, Pace/Patience, and Conformity provide a tapestry of behavioral outcomes. Your behavioral makeup is unique. Having the ability to understand your traits, along with the rest of your team, allows you to better understand communication, stress, energy, and leadership.
As the fundamental building blocks of leadership shift away from authority, knowledge, and information and towards vulnerability, transparency, and authenticity, commit to understanding yourself. Know your strengths and invest in getting to know the people around you.
7. Finding the Right People for the Right Tasks
Have you ever had to complete a task that completely drained your energy? Some work energizes you, and some work zaps your joy. It’s more than discomfort. It's a gut-level awareness that you are not matched with your natural strengths. It feels like you're swimming upstream or pushing a boulder uphill that will inevitably fall back down.
Ensuring your team flows toward its optimal potential may involve rearranging "who" does "what" in your organization. Getting the right people in the correct position will involve aligning strengths to tasks. When doing this, leaders create synergy. There's a spark that takes place and creates a more profound commitment to purpose. When leaders value people for their strengths and set them up to succeed, your team will start cooking with gas!
8. Turnover
Have you felt the impact of turnover on your team?
Leaky leads fall through the cracks. Institutional knowledge isn't transferred.
You lose momentum. You lose focus.
Leaders understand that turnover has a detrimental impact on the bottom line. It also impacts the day-to-day operations as leaders shift to cover up the holes that puncture the protective shell of a healthy culture. While not all turnover is wrong, there is usually a cost. Sometimes, you have to root out toxic behaviors.
However, understanding cultural and behavioral fit on the front end will reduce turnover in your organization. Align your hiring strategy to the organization's needs beyond the required skills and credentials. Set new leaders for success with effective onboarding. Make it an "ever-boarding" process. World-class leaders are never satisfied to settle for the status quo. Keep evolving to meet the needs of your culture.
9. The Pareto Principle
How do you determine what's most important?
Maybe you task track or use a calendar-blocking technique?
Or maybe you aren't as proactive as you could be with your time. Living a reactionary life will rob your vitality and take away your joy. Even if you love what you do, the constant tug of war to the loudest noise can extinguish your passion for your work.
You need something tangible. You need to live on purpose. Overcoming team challenges starts with self-leadership. The Pareto Principle provides a way to focus on the areas in your life that lead to the greatest impact. By focusing on the top 20% of your activities, you will create 80% of your impact.
Rediscover your focus. Learn what creates impact and how to leverage how you invest time and energy effectively. Align your behaviors to these tasks, and you'll reap the rewards.
10. Developing Aspiring Leaders
Growing your bench strength starts with a commitment to understanding yourself and your team and the strengths and gaps you all bring. Raising the leadership capacity of your organization begins with self-leadership. Creating a culture where future leaders thrive requires intentional effort to develop leaders who lead themselves well.
Understanding their strengths paves the way for cultural transformation. The truth is, if you're going after anything worth pursuing, you need people. You need people who aren't exactly like you, too! This creates a firm foundation of strengths that, when rowing in the same direction, can make decisions and solve problems at a high level.
Team Challenges with Performance
11. Communication and Accountability
Communication is the bedrock of any relationship. As a result, the more effective your communication, the more effective your organization. To raise the level of communication in your organization, you must learn to hold others accountable.
What does this mean? Accountability is a reset. It's an opportunity to learn, grow, and commit to agreed-upon goals.
There are 3 Types of Accountability every team needs:
Top-Down: Top-down accountability is the most common form of accountability. This form of accountability is the traditional style of what it looks like in the workplace. A leader provides accountability to the team they manage.
Bottom-Up: Bottom-up accountability flips traditional accountability on its head. This type of accountability is often seen as a change in the power dynamics of a company. With bottom-up accountability, the team holds leaders accountable for their actions, behaviors, and deliverables.
Sideways: Sideways accountability is the most effective form of accountability. This peer-to-peer accountability occurs closer to the moment of action. When teams feel empowered to solve problems and make decisions, accountability becomes a learning opportunity, not a "gotcha" moment.
12. Performance Evaluation
Do you have a process for performance evaluation? These conversations can be both exhilarating and frightening. Poor performance can be a touchy subject, especially when trust is absent from a relationship. However, rewarding performance is equally as necessary when considering a fruitful path for evaluation. Leaders often focus on how to deliver challenging messages, and rightly so! It's one of the most challenging aspects of leadership.
Yet, leaders may forget to deliver the positive message of a job well done or encouragement. Your people need this, too, and a performance evaluation is an excellent opportunity to let them know what they mean to the team.
13. Leading Conflict
If you want to take the next step in your leadership, you must learn to lead conflict. Conflict management is an attempt to control what you cannot control. Conflict leadership is a trust accelerator. It is an opportunity to reshuffle the deck with a more trustworthy foundation.
You must learn to make conflict your BFF, to trust that addressing the issues everyone is thinking about but no one is talking about constructively. When these issues lurk beneath the surface, drama is surely running rampant. We believe leaders must take the initiative. They must embrace discomfort and bring about a more successful outcome by leaning into the trust-building power of conflict.
14. Understanding the Teaming Process
What makes a world-class team? How do you set yourself and others up for success?
It starts with understanding your team, their strengths, and the mix of behaviors you want to bring together. The teaming process sometimes feels tricky, but by transitioning away from our perceptions of one another into a deeper perspective of how each member fits to make the puzzle, you will find the power of synergy.
15. Transferring Organizational Knowledge
The workforce is headed toward a monumental shift in generational leadership. If you want your business to live beyond your tenure, you must transfer the fundamental organizational knowledge you've learned throughout your time in leadership. If you do not have a culture of transparency where this can occur, you will struggle to successfully shift gears into the future.
16. Locking in Your Corporate Culture
The health of your corporate culture is a constant battle. Your culture is a living organism, much like yourself. You must make decisions that feed that end goal to live a healthy life. Your commitment to those decisions will compound over time. In the same way, your ability to lock in your culture is a constant process.
You must never arrive. Self-evaluation never stops. Fall in love with learning and growing together as a team. This is rarely easy, but it is worth the effort.
Developing a Culture of Positive Behavior Change
The PDP ProScan addresses these leadership challenges and offers a pathway to deeper understanding and positive behavior change. You don't have to rely on your gut instincts alone; use trustworthy data points to improve your decision-making and problem-solving skills to win as a team. InitiativeOne's team of experts knows what it takes to deliver large-scale organizational change. The truth is, it starts with you!
Set up a meeting today to begin our proven Leadership Transformation Process.