A young doctor, just two months into his career, was tasked with a seemingly straightforward follow-up procedure — removing two tubes left in a patient after surgery. These tubes delivered painkillers deep into the body, and the process was simple: pull out the tubes, clean the wounds, and dress the site.
According to Gallup, nearly 80% of employees worldwide are either not engaged or actively disengaged.1 Gallup further found that engagement levels would increase significantly if leaders had frequent coaching conversations with their team members.2
Despite the benefits of having regular coaching conversations with their team members, many leaders are still not doing it or, worse, avoiding it!
One common reason leaders say prevents them from coaching is the assumption that they don’t have time. They fail to realise that integrating coaching into their regular conversations with their team members (i.e., coaching-style conversations instead of formal coaching) would take much less time than they expect.
Continue reading “Unleash Your Team’s Potential: Coaching Conversations that Drive Results”
The world of work has changed.
In today’s dynamic work environment, where disruptive change is the norm, the traditional command-and-control model of leadership is no longer effective. Instead, leaders must embrace a model where they empower their teams and leverage their individual and collective strengths to adapt, innovate, and deal with challenges.
In other words, leaders must use a coaching approach by integrating coaching into their roles.
While organisations are increasingly expecting their leaders/managers to coach employees, the reality is that many leaders don’t know how to coach well.1, 2 One problem is that they don’t understand what coaching means. Another issue is that they don’t have the skills or mindset to do it well.
Continue reading “Unleash Your Team’s Potential: Become a Leader-Coach (Not Just a Boss)”
Your team is like an orchestra where each member brings their talents and unique contributions to help create a harmonious, emotionally resonant musical experience that moves the audience. A powerful performance happens when every musician understands the collective interpretation of the musical piece and how their parts contribute to creating that unified performance.
If some members have values or motivations that do not align with the orchestra’s (e.g., wanting to be the stand-out lone star, feeling that their part is unimportant, or just wanting to get through the day and receive the paycheck), the collective performance will be significantly affected.
One key driver for exceptional team/employee engagement is team members feeling “My work is meaningful!” Research1 has found that ‘meaningfulness’ matters more to us than other aspects of our work. When employees feel their work is meaningful, their performance improves by 33%!2
Continue reading “Why Understanding Your Team’s “Why” Matters”
If you live in my country or my region of the world, you might be familiar with bands that play at Chinese funerals. Those bands play familiar tunes but in a cringe-worthy way. Even kids know that members of these bands are there to go through the motions, not to give great performances.
Your team is like an orchestra. Each member is a talented musician playing an instrument with unique capabilities. For the orchestra to perform a beautiful symphony that moves the listeners, every musician must be fully engaged, harmonised, and committed to the collective performance.
An orchestra with musicians who are not fully engaged or, worse, disengaged will produce music that is, at best, technically correct but lacking soul and, at worst, discordant and unpleasant!
Continue reading “4 Underlying Factors Driving Exceptional Team Engagement”
