“Individuals don’t win. Teams do.” – Sam Walton
Often when people think of a leader, they think of directing others. One secret, though, to great leaders is that they serve. As a leader your privilege is to serve your team members so that they are successful. Your role is one of providing support and resources so that they can succeed.
This can actually be a relief for you. As a leader, do you ever put pressure on yourself to come up with all of the ideas and to be the answer for everything? A leader recognizes the valuable talents and strengths of their team members and then empowers them to use it. As your team succeeds, the organization will succeed which means you succeed.
One key to serving your team is to make sure that members are aware of their strengths and passions. An informal way to do this is to ask questions and listen. Where have they been successful in the past? What about them made the project successful? What gets them excited? Another option is to have members take formal talent, behavioral and values assessments to gain awareness of their strengths.
But gaining awareness is only the first step. Then you must engage team members to put their strengths into action. Coaching is a form of serving others. Here is a true story of how Deanna became engaged to use her strengths to help her organization succeed through the coaching she received.
Leading by serving example
Deanna is a mid-manager in an organization, where productivity and morale were low. She was feeling frustrated and exhausted at work. Recent changes had happened that required giving part of her management responsibilities to another. Because of the other person’s credentials and new regulations, she understood why these responsibilities were given to another, but she still felt under recognized for her years of experience. She also felt frustrated with the communications between herself and her boss.
Because of the low engagement at this organization, the upper and mid-management teams took part in corporate coaching. With her team, Donna learned about several issues such as personal responsibility, communication and attitudes. She also completed assessments. Through the DISC assessment, she learned about how she and her boss communicate differently.
Deanna also learned about her talents in empathy and passion to help others. She realized that these strengths and passion were a good fit with her job, so why was she struggling with not being engaged at work? Through coaching, Deanna realized she was working out of a mind set of obligation, instead of out of her passion for helping others. When she put work into this new framework, her satisfaction and fulfillment at work took off. She then began having discussions with the team she led about their strengths and passions which led to greater productivity for the entire team.
Investing in our own development and in our team is worth the investment. Serve others by developing and empowering them. We started our discussion with a quote from Sam Walton, whose stores, Walmart, have become a household name. I would like to end with quote from him also.
“Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish.”