Editor’s note:
This post is inspired by a discussion that happened on the Leader’s Cafe Foundation Forum in LinkedIn. The forum can be found here: Link To LinkedIn Forum. And the specific discussion can be found here: Specific Discussion.
Dear Managers and Leaders!
In my three previous posts, I listed 6 symptoms that leaders should take really seriously and analyzed the first two symptoms: "A team member does not produce what the leader was expecting" and "Team members are not coming up with new ideas". Today, we will continue our analysis and tackle the third symptom: Team members are unwilling to push their boundaries.
As a leader, it is really important to grow your team. If you don’t, then your team will become stale and you will not be able to grow your vision, aspire for better things for your team. A dynamic team, just like a dynamic individual, is a team that grows!
You can grow your team by bringing in more people. The new people will bring fresh ideas and energy on to the table and will help expand your team further. But bringing in new people is not always possible due to political or economical reasons.
Another way of growing your team is by growing your team members. As a leader, you need to ensure that the people on your team are challenged and involved in a constant learning process. You have to give stretch objectives to your people that will help them go beyond what they have accomplished up until now. This will keep them interested, focused, and challenged. Also, it will allow your team to tackle more and more difficult tasks and thus take more and more space in the larger organization.
But what do you do when someone on your team does not want to grow anymore? What if someone constantly refused your stretch assignments and only wanted to be confined in the same tasks over and over again? That person comes in, does his job, and leaves, without showing a desire to succeed and to go beyond what was accomplished yesterday.
As this person’s leader, you need to have a serious discussion with him to understand why he is not willing to go beyond his boundaries. It may very well be caused by personal reasons (divorce, illness, ...) and you may have to accept the current situation while the personal conditions persist. If personal reasons are not causing the situation, I would next explore these environmental conditions as potential factors.
- Compelling vision for the team - When the team spirit is really low and when people don’t feel they are part of a real team, when people do not share a common compelling vision, people will not feel like going the extra mile and pushing their limits. If you feel your team is not pushing hard, look at how people perceive their team and how motivated they are to make the team succeed. To accept to grow, people need to feel they are part of a bigger something that becomes more important than their own comfort.
- Accept mistakes - Pushing our own limit means taking risks. It means going beyond what we have accomplished so far, with no proof that we can actually do it right the first time. For people to accept to go beyond their boundaries, they need to feel they are in a safe environment where mistakes are allowed. Safety is at the second level of Maslow’s pyramid. Most people will not take risks if they do not feel it is safe. So, support people you have stretched by accepting their mistakes.
- Incentives and rewards - People need to have a reason to grow, to go out of their comfort zone. You must make sure people understand why you are asking them to achieve these stretch objectives. You need to explain why these goals are essential for them, for the team, for the larger organization. You can even explain the process of growing and why you are asking them to grow. Also, you need to celebrate growing successes more than any other accomplishments. Do not forget awards and public recognition of your people’s successes. This is very important.
- Realistic stretch - People will follow you and work on your stretch objectives as long as they believe they are attainable. If they feel they will fail even before they start, motivation will not be there, people will not feel safe, and they are then likely to give up before they start. Your first job as a leader is to carefully choose assignments so people will be able to achieve them. Your second job is to convince your people that they can and will achieve their stretch objectives.
- Coaching them to success - Once you give a stretch goal to someone on your team, you cannot leave him alone with it. You must feel responsible for his success. You need to follow what he is doing and help him along the way. Not that you should do the job for him, but you must support him and guide him towards success. If someone on your team fails a stretch objective, he will be less likely to tackle your next stretch assignment with enthusiasm and could soon become one who refuses to push his boundaries.
What about you dear leader, have you ever met people who did not want to go beyond their boundaries? Have you ever felt like not going beyond your boundaries? Please help me complete the picture by adding your comments!
Until next time,
Remi Cote
PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.
You need to have more involvement in the team and identify the root causes. If the whole team is not willing to push themsleves, there is a fundamental problem and mostly with the organisation or the leadeship.
ReplyDeleteif there are islands of people who are not motivated, talk to them and tlak to their boss and peers and understand why it happens. Also good to check their track record in the previous roles to ascertain as to whether it is a personality issue or the new set up is causing the issue
Men times the team dynamics does not work and it brings doen the output. Be sensitive to the team needs and structure the team groups to get the best out of them
As a leader , you need to be highly inspirational and demosnstrate your ability to stretch beyond the boundaries. Possibily it might have positive rub off efffects
Whe nothing works to generate enthusiasm in an individual and you are usre it is the attitude, you need to move him for some indepenedent assignment of his strength . Believe that every has their strength and are willoing to contribute and strench in positive and conducive work environments.
The the postive thinking will make up solve issues
When there is low productivity or less desire to push boundaries It's possible there are also contradictions within the leaders vision or communications so perhaps the leader could use a reflecting chair, have a conversation with himself. After all, our world reflects us. Has the leader lowered his own sights and standards or unconsciously hedged on something himself that has left a film of doubt that festers like an invisible thorn among his team?
ReplyDeleteI've always found it interesting that some managers equate "succeeding" with "pushing your boundaries". Oddly enough, I always thought "succeeding" meant...well...succeeding. If a person does their job and does it extremely well, pushing boundaries may not be particularly necessary, depending on the environment.
ReplyDeleteThe simple fact is that some jobs DON'T call for significant expansion of skills, and many people are supremely content in performing "McJobs", so to speak. Is pushing them out of their comfort zone really such a good thing? What if you push them right to the point where they leave, and the person who replaces them isn't half as good but is willing to broaden their horizons? Was that a good trade-off?
Does an accountant also need to learn basket-weaving? Or a programmer need to learn management skills? It may be very helpful for an accountant in a basket-weaving factory to learn it, and a programmer who intends to rise to management will certainly need to learn management skills, but the accountant who has no need for basket-weaving, or the programmer who never intends to manage should not be pushed to learn these things just because it will "broaden their horizons".
Now all that said, if the environment calls for expansion of capabilities, and it's within what a person can do and should, theoretically, have interest in doing, but they still aren't willing, THEN I think there's a problem. I just disagree with the fundamental assumption that expansion of skills is necessarily a "must have" for the success of an employee or team. In many teams it will be, but you know what they say about the word "assume".
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ReplyDeleteI do not think I wrote that succeeding equates to pushing boundaries. However, I said that a manager must keep his team members interested and challenged. I believe this is true at McJobs as well.
ReplyDeleteTo have a team working at its peak performance, you have to always improve processes, always make sure that team members are well trained and interested in making things better.
This is what I believe.
You said it in the negative, but what you said was, "...without showing a desire to succeed and to go beyond what was accomplished yesterday."
ReplyDeleteDear Anonymus, maybe we will have to agree to disagree :-). Which is not a bad thing, it is OK and sane to have different opinions! But let me try to clarify my thoughts one last time...
ReplyDeleteI believe that people will remain interested in their job if they expand their skills, if they keep learning, and feel that they improve. Yes, some people do their job very well in areas where they do not need to improve their skills drastically and re-invent themselves every day.
However, I believe that a good leader will work on expanding their vision by explaining to them why doing this part or that part of the job is important to the organization, by engaging his best elements in finding better ways of doing what they are doing well already. If they do not want to improve, maybe it is because the leader is not showing them where to go next...
Note that I do not disagree that people can succeed at some jobs without constant learning or taking on more responsibilities or "pushing their boundaries". In the long term, though, I would be concerned about their motivation level and at keeping their level of success.
Bah! Lost my posting! Let's try this again....
ReplyDeleteI think from what you're saying that perhaps I over-reacted. The last company I worked for was very much in favour of always expanding skills. They didn't use it as a motivational tool, however, but rather as a means of determining annual bonuses. If you constantly improved your skills significantly, you got a bigger bonus. If the demands of your job didn't make that easy, you were pressured to find time for both somehow, and obviously if you didn't, you didn't get as big of a bonus (or your job performance suffered, also resulting in less of a bonus). This very clearly had the opposite effect on morale and motiviation from the approach you're taking.
I agree completely that one of the primary concerns of any good manager should be keeping their employees interested in their job, but I think that expansion of skills is only one of many methods to do so, and it should certainly not be used as the bludgeon that my former employer did.
Suffice it to say that I think your approach sounds far more positive than my initial impression, which was no doubt biased by my previous experiences.
(I think I did a better job of explaining this the first time, but oh well.)
Anonymous,
ReplyDeleteI'm glad that we finally came to an understanding.
I can see the problem you had with your former boss. This might be an example of a good intention that turned into something negative for a lot of employees.
Thanks a lot for participating in this discussion!
Not that it really matters, but just as a point of clarification, it wasn't just my boss that was the issue...it was company policy in a corporation of something like 40,000 or 50,000.
ReplyDelete