A study of 32,000 workers has found that half spent three hours or less with their leader each week. Photo: e-days.com.
Michelle Gibbings says it is too easy for teams to feel neglected if leaders spend most of their time in back-to-back meetings with external stakeholders and senior colleagues.
When you look at your working week (or day), do you know how much time is devoted to your team versus meetings and catering to the demands of senior colleagues and 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.
A study of 32,000 workers found that half spent three hours or less with their leader each week.
This time allocation was 50 per cent 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. Here is how they can 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.
Elevate the ‘’how’’: When you focus primarily on the task, you 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 can focus on nurturing each member’s personal growth and development.
Influential leaders show a genuine interest in their team members. When people know they matter, their loyalty and commitment to the work accelerate.
Create connection: Creating this thriving team environment requires awareness, patience and persistence. Central to this is spending quality time with your team.
Find out what motivates your team members and how they want to connect and engage with each other. Ask each 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.
It helps if you role-model inclusive behaviour. For example, be open with your team about your pressure points and what you do to manage stress and maintain a healthy lifestyle.
Listen deeply: Create opportunities for open dialogue. For example, consider a program of regular check-ins at both the group and individual levels.
When talking with team members, you may not be able to fix the issue or agree with their perspective. What you can do is make them feel seen and heard.
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.
University of Virginia Professor Kristin Behfar and her 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.
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 often cemented in place.
This approach fails to appreciate that the team’s dynamics shift whenever someone leaves or enters it.
Consequently, every time there is a change, you need to reassess 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.
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?
Michelle Gibbings is a Melbourne-based workplace expert, and an award-winning author. She’s on a mission to help leaders, teams and organisations create successful workplaces – where people thrive and progress is accelerated. She can be contacted at [email protected].
