Positively Influence Any Team’s Work Culture With 5 Leadership Basics
As a leader, you have an important role to play in maintaining a healthy work culture. What you do today will influence what your colleagues do tomorrow. Multiply these actions over the course of six months, and you end up with a wonderful place of work or employees finding any excuse to stay home.
Effective leaders lead by example. You have a tremendous impact and influence on your team. What follows are five basic but powerful aspects of leadership to leave a lasting mark on any company’s work culture.
Civility and respect
Civil and respectful interactions between colleagues have an invaluable benefit to the organization. Namely, people like to come to work, and they do a better job when they are there.
The list of benefits that civil and respectful interactions bring to workplaces is significant. Let’s take a look:
- high level of company morale
- a greater sense of job satisfaction
- a more resilient and cohesive teams
- consistent levels of productivity
- increased collaboration
- motivated employees who are happy to go above and beyond
- and perhaps unsurprisingly, low turnover and absenteeism. Everyone benefits.
Begin by demonstrating that you value colleagues and appreciate what they do. If you have faith in what they do, make sure they know it. Do your part to help create an environment that nurtures individual insight and cooperative brainstorming. Encourage their creativity. The result is a confident workplace. People are motivated to contribute and feel they are essential to the overall success of the company.
Politeness Matters In Work Culture
Politeness matters because of the influence it offers. An inspiring and positive work environment is often fueled by courteous and polite behavior.
When the leader has a polite manner, the team will eventually follow suit. Politeness is a valued asset in today’s workplace. Polite leaders are thoughtful and caring people who treat their team with dignity, respect, civility, and empathy.
Make people feel great and you will receive great things from them!
Listen and allow people to speak and to finish sentences. Your team will adapt your approach and when working with you and their colleagues.
Being Helpful
Sometimes we fail to see that being truly helpful means knowing what and how to provide what is needed from us.
It’s one thing to offer help, but it is quite another to give that help in an actually helpful way.
Leaders can be prone to a false or misguided understanding of their helpfulness. They may often focus too much on a company’s big picture and strategic vision but a woefully inadequate amount of time on the day-to-day workings and implementing such objectives. By not spending enough time on the smaller, detail-heavy processes with their team (where 90% of the work gets done), leaders can easily become obstacles.
So, how exactly can you become more helpful as a leader? Almost remove yourself from the equation. In other words, it is all about serving your organization and the team. Allow the team you lead to define the terms on how you can best help them. Listen. Step aside from yourself and let those you offer to help tell you exactly how you can do so. You may be surprised to learn that you were more helpful at times when you step aside and let them do what they do best.
Handling Feedback
Let’s face it, being on the receiving end of criticism can be difficult. Who likes being told they could be better? Most of us don’t! In a perfect world, we would all be reacting objectively and rationally to feedback. We would use the insight to better ourselves personally and professionally. But it isn’t always that way. Our reactions to negative feedback tend to be reactionary and defensive. We feel attacked and unappreciated!
Reacting to feedback in an overly defensive manner causes us to miss important and valuable insights from others. By creating “noise”—that is, being overly reactive and defensive, at the slightest sign of criticism—we undermine our potential to be good listeners. Additionally, we diminish our capacity for improving how we behave with others in the world.
Forget about everything else. Treat the opportunity to interact with the person who is providing the feedback as a privilege.
You are being given a rare opportunity to see how others see and think of you. How often are you allowed to learn more about yourself from somebody else’s perspective? These moments are special, and you should treat them as such.
Accepting constructive feedback in a professional and empathetic manner is an important skill for any professional to master. It will provide you a golden opportunity to learn more about yourself and show your colleagues that you are open to constructive feedback and personal growth. A win-win, in my view!
Stories have Power
Today’s successful leaders are well aware of the powers and value of a compelling narrative. Think of Apple, Tesla, or Microsoft. Three hugely successful companies whose leaders have over the years harnessed the power of story to sell their company to the public and their employees.
An organization’s story often begins with a vision, with a powerful result that at the onset is by no means easy to achieve. But the story is what creates “buy-in.” It’s the struggle that makes it real and universal. We have all been there to some degree; we have all done that in some way.
A well-articulated vision builds loyalty. It can motivate entire teams to pool their skill sets and unique creativity toward a common organizational goal. A vision that is rooted in a story has a purpose. This can be the case internally with employees and externally with stakeholders.
Make your organization feel like it is part of a story that is evolving and still working towards its intended goal. It could not happen without every single one of them.
Successful organizations are greater than the sum of their parts. The success is rooted in an ability to bring everyone together under a unified vision.
