If we want to lead our teams into the achievement zone, we need to lead ourselves there first.
One of the most common complaints from employees about leadership is that leaders don't 'walk the talk.' It creates a lack of trust - spurring resistance to goals and negative employee interactions. Making it hard to generate cultural change longer term.
And while everyone likes to blame leaders for this perceived lack of integrity, aligning our intentions with our actions is difficult. Sometimes people misread our actions because they don't understand the context driving our behaviours. While other times, we are not aware that there is a disconnect.
Given how important it is for employees to see that leadership is modelling the right behaviours, talking our way into trust isn't enough. We have to behave into it.
So how do we behave so that our people trust us? How can we ensure we aren't letting our personal blind spots stop us from being the leaders others want us to be?
Well, one of the biggest areas for this conflict, is how we get results.
In the achievement zone, leaders get results through creating an environment high in both psychological safety and accountability. This is where people know they are working together as a team because risk and credit are shared and managed together. The measurement of success is that teams win together, not individuals. The outcome is that the next time you have a big challenge, your team member's will have the right attitude for success. They will be excited and ready to go.
While in the anxiety zone, it is all about delivering results which can unintentionally create an adversarial win-lose environment between team members. Criticism is high and praise is in short supply. In a high accountability and low psychologically safe environment, stress and burnout are common. Often, the leader's behaviour suggests that accountability is only at the individual level. So people look out for themselves and offer less support to others. Self-interest and self-protection is often at the expense of the whole organisation.
This high pressure environment might seem acceptable to success driven leaders, who are harder on themselves, than their team members. Yet, the reality is that the next time they need to challenge people to deliver, it is going to be harder, not easier to get results. Creating frustration and anxiety for all as the possibility of missing a deadline looms.
So as a leader, it's fairly obvious that to reduce sliding into the anxiety zone with our team, we need to be aware of our own behavioural blindspots. There are four questions we need to ask in two different environments. The first set of questions is with ourselves. While the second, is with our team members. These being:
- What results am I getting? / What results are we getting?
- How am I getting those results? / How are we getting those results?
Typically, we only consider what results we are getting (lag indicators), but how we achieve them is key to ensuring the right behaviours and team environment moving forward (lead indicators). After all, the how part of getting results will either slow us down next time or help us rally the efforts of our team with ease.
And while it is helpful to reflect on both these questions, you will improve trust and influence more when you ask these question with your team. Depending on how comfortable they are sharing their opinions with you, you will get feedback with how the behaviours in the team are either contributing to high performance or anxiety. And how your behaviours impact everyone else. This is important feedback to help you realistically create an environment for your team to thrive.
If you want more tips on how to build trust in your team, ask me about my SUCCEED Together® coaching program.
