Question for today:
What motivates your people to turn up each day to do more than the bare minimum and have a real crack for you?
In the past two blogs, I’ve talked about how to lead your Business Vision with conviction (if you’re not leading passionately from the front, why should anyone else care) and, how to clearly communicate the Vision to your team.
But once you’re doing those things (remember, they’re a constant responsibility of the leader), WHY should your people care about and invest themselves in the Vision for your business?
They might be clear about what the Vision is and see that YOU’RE totally sold out to seeing it come to fruition, but why should THEY care about it?
What motivates your team to turn up each day and give you their best?
How do they make a personal and emotional connection with your Vision?
Because the difference is going from an alright place to work to an amazing one.
From simply nudging your goals, to outright smashing all expectations.
There are many important factors that drive the engagement of your team in your Vision – but for today, I’m going to give you three.
Your Values Should Underpin Your Vision.
Your values are what you stand for – your non-negotiables of behaviour when it comes to doing business and going after your Vision.
I’m finding more and more, people are wanting to work for businesses that align with their values, who stand for something that they do.
We spend the majority of our lives at work and we want that real connection between where we work and our hearts/what we think matters most.
For example, my vision is “To build stronger leaders to live better lives.”
My values are FLITU – Family, Loyalty, Integrity, Trust, and Unity. I believe that you can’t live a better life without these values underpinning and driving everything.
But say for example that I’m working my team into the ground with unrealistic expectations, have them working long hours continually with no time off so they can’t be with their families or have work-life balance – I’m not providing my team/my work family with a better life so there will be a huge disconnect between my people, my values and thus my Vision.
We don’t always get it right, but these are what we always strive for, and everyone who knows me, knows this.
What are your values?
Do they truly underpin how you go about achieving your Vision for the business day to day?
Do your people resonate with your values?
Tie Your Peoples’ Goals to the Vision.
Another effective way to make the Vision personal for your team is to tie their goals into the Vision.
You need to give it meaning in the day-to-day.
Depending on the size of your business, you’ve got to break it down into team and personal goals.
Say for example you own a small plumbing company in Sydney and your vision was: “To be famous for our customer service and care throughout Greater Sydney.”
You could break the Vision down into KPI’s for each technician, and one of them could be “A target percentage of customer appointments attended to on time”, or “ A target percentage of 5-Star customer service ratings in the customer follow-up survey”.
Then recognise and reward these achievements when they’re accomplished.
What gets inspected gets done.
But what gets rewarded gets done even better and you’re that much closer to achieving your Vision.
Have you broken your Vision down into individual goals?
Do you reward your people when they meet their goals?
By doing this, your people can see how their role directly impacts achieving the Vision.
Utilise the unique strengths of your people to achieve the Vision.
We all love doing what we’re good at. Every time we use our strengths it validates us a little more. When you allow your people to utilise and practice their key strengths at work to help achieve the Vision, it builds them up on the inside and they feel a greater connection to it.
One of the first things I ask every client when I go into their business is – do you have the right people in the right roles? Meaning do you have people in roles that are utilising their strengths?
If they’re unsure, we Personality Profile each key team member to determine their key strengths (and weaknesses) to see if they match the requirements of their role. Many times, we’ve moved people around in the business which has led to significant growth in team unity, harmony, and ultimately business performance toward achieving the Vision.
You can read more about how to do this here.
Sometimes, it’s not possible to move people around your business, particularly if it’s smaller, but there’s still plenty of scope to use the key strengths of your people in many ways.
For example, one of your younger team members or apprentices might be fantastic at speaking with or presenting to clients – let them occasionally – and you stand back and watch. It shows trust, thus building their heart and spirit, develops loyalty to you, and grows their skills, which leads to engaging with you and your Vision.
Or perhaps one of your warehouse team members loves to organise social events or is really creative at coming up with performance rewards – why not let them plan some team gatherings or source rewards? Or maybe you’ve got an admin team member who’s great at making videos or interesting posts on social media – could you utilise this for your business? It might give them a welcome break in their day and make them feel more connected to the overall Vision.
Maybe you’ve noticed a team member who is really good at coming alongside their teammates and giving them support – how can you best utilse this skill? This could free up some of your time potentially and develop leadership skills in your team member, building their heart and spirit and those of their teammates.
These are just ideas to get you started and give you the gist of what I’m talking about here. I’m sure you’ve already thought of some already.
I know I’ve thrown a lot at you today, but it’s a topic I’m so passionate about and I’ve only scratched the tip of the iceberg, but I trust you’ve been stimulated and challenged about one or two things you could do in your business to connect your people with what you’re trying to achieve.
If you’d like more information on how to engage your people in your Vision to fuel performance (and much more) to take your business to where you’d like it to go, check out our flagship online program, High-Performance Team Fundamentals.
Whether you’re not satisfied where you are right now and feel stuck or, you’re growing exponentially and would like to know how to strategically grow and lead your team, our program has you covered.
It takes you step by step, at your own pace, through my Leadership Dynamics process that’s been yielding results for my clients over the last 20 years. Why not you too?
Or you can contact me any time to talk about how we can help your business.
Take care and keep climbing,
Coxey.
Peter Cox
CEO and Founder
Leadership Dynamics
