When you look at the working week (or day), do you know how much time is devoted to your team versus working on tasks, meetings and being with colleagues or stakeholders?
You’re not alone if you don’t know the answer to that question.
Many leaders don’t examine how they allocate time over their working week.
What’s likely is that you are spending less time with your team members than they would like.
One study, which surveyed more than 32000 people, found that half of those surveyed spent three hours or less with their leader each week. This time allocation was 50% less than what they indicated as the optimal time of six hours.
Leaders face competing demands, never-ending change, back-to-back meetings and constant pressure, so they must make deliberate choices about how and where they allocate their time.
Balance the Focus
Influential leaders balance time with their team and time to manage relationships with internal colleagues and external stakeholders.
When it comes to their team, they also focus on balancing the ‘what’ and the ‘how’. The ‘how’ is about working together and bringing out the best in their team members. The ‘what’ is the work or tasks to be completed.
However, when leaders are crunched for time, they often forgo the ‘how’ and give more attention to the ‘what’. Yet, when the ‘how’ is humming, the ‘what’ happens more seamlessly.
Challenge yourself: What do you devote the most time to when you are with your team members? Is it the team (individually or collectively) or the tasks?
Elevate the How
When you focus primarily on the task, your interactions can feel transactional and not create the space for deep connection. You also potentially miss out on the opportunity to coach and develop your team members.
When you elevate the ‘how’, you recognise the needs of your team members at an individual level. You accept that each team member is unique and how you best work with them can differ. You focus on nurturing your team members’ personal growth and development.
Influential leaders show a genuine interest in their team members, and this interest demonstrates to their team that they matter. When people know they matter, their loyalty and commitment to the work accelerate. That’s also why influence works best as a team pursuit rather than a solo act.
Create Connection
Creating this thriving team environment isn’t about the one thing you do. It requires awareness, patience and persistence so that activities and support are consciously and consistently applied. Central to this is spending quality time with your team.
Find out what motivates your team members and how the team wants to connect and engage with each other. Ask each team member what they need from you to enable them to be their best each day at work.
Ensure there are open lines of communication and that everyone in the team belongs. People want to feel like they belong, and this can be difficult if they think they are out of the loop and disconnected from you or their colleagues.
As part of this, you will want to focus on establishing a psychologically safe environment (as I’ve written about before) where your team are comfortable sharing what’s working (or not) and how they feel.
It helps if you role model inclusive behaviours, which are underpinned by high emotional intelligence. For example, be open with your team about your pressure points and what you do to manage stress and maintain a healthy lifestyle.
Next week’s World Mental Health Day is a timely reminder that leaders must be ready to spot the warning signs of stress and burnout in their team members. These signs may include feeling ineffective and more cynical, having reduced energy, motivation, and efficiency, and being more frustrated and irritable. When burnout hits, people often turn to unhealthy crutches such as drinking, eating poorly, and relying on substances and other harmful mechanisms to get them through the day.
You will want to notice if your team members are working excessively hard or doing lots of overtime, yet their productivity is waning. Noticing is only possible when you spend genuine and quality time with your team.
Listen Deeply
Create opportunities for open dialogue. For example, consider a program of regular check-ins at both the group and individual levels. You might also consider having regular team building days.
When talking with team members, remember that you may not be able to fix the issue or agree with their perspective.
What you can do, which will have a valuable impact, is make them feel seen and heard. By doing that, you demonstrate to them that they matter. Many times, just by hearing what they say, listening with compassion, and showing a genuine interest in what concerns them, you’ll have given them exactly what they need.
Encourage Healthy Dissent
The word dissent has negative connotations and raises concerns that it can be destructive. However, constructive disagreement leads to better decision-making and innovation in teams.
The University of Virginia professor Kristin Behfar and colleagues discovered that when conflict in teams becomes personal, the team is less productive. However, when the issues of contention focus on priorities and goals, for example, the disagreement can lead to better outcomes.
You want to create a safe and accountable space for different ideas and opinions and promote respectful debate.
Once again, this is about you focusing on the team. When you focus on the team, the tasks then get delivered more efficiently and effectively.
Regularly Refresh Dynamics
Teams often spend time developing and agreeing on their ways of working. They might decide on a values statement or team charter. However, once it’s completed at the annual team day, it is cemented in place.
This approach fails to appreciate that the team’s dynamics shift every time someone leaves or enters the team. Consequently, every time there is a change, you need to re-assess the team’s dynamics and discuss and agree on the principles of how you work together.
Yes, this takes time, but it’s the most effective way of ensuring buy-in and agreement on how you work together. You want everyone working from the same base of understanding so they know the standard and can hold each other to account (and themselves).
Remember, just as your focus on ‘tasks’ never goes away, nor should your focus on the team’s ways of working and connection. So, proactively schedule regular sessions and team days where you can focus on both these elements.
As a leader, you face choices every day, and one of those choices is to consider what comes first for you – the team or the task. So, what will your choice be today?
Getting you ready for tomorrow, today®
Michelle Gibbings is a workplace expert, the award-winning author of three books, and a global keynote speaker. She’s on a mission to help leaders, teams and organisations create successful workplaces – where people thrive and progress is accelerated.