Integritus Prime

Think about it: everything you do is a behavior, whether it’s eating lunch or designing a new robot. The challenge is, as team leaders we don’t often assign importance to many of our seemingly mundane work tasks, which ends up influencing our team. Tweaking our everyday habits can shift not only our own perspective, but that of our team toward higher motivation and better outcomes.

• Challenge: You often subconsciously perform and model behaviors that can demotivate your team.
• Solution: Take the time to consciously and mindfully cultivate habits that bring meaning and motivation to your team. Hint: start with yourself.

I’ll go through three examples based on our integrated Alchemus Prime Diamond Model, and feel free to let me know what you think.

1. Connect to collective identity and purpose. Menial tasks can sometimes demotivate us. For instance, when you’re writing an email that contains a request from your team, you might write is very concisely and send it without much thought. Your team will look at it, register that this is a task (say, reaching out to existing clients with new information) they have to do, and proceed to carry it out without much motivation. You could take a little time to put in some language that affirms the team’s good work and greater purpose in carrying out that task. Connect the task to its beneficial outcomes to the team, company, and broader community. Invoke team identity and cohesion through your language. Now, your team is motivated to do a good job because the task is connected to a bigger cause, and chances are everyone they interact with in the course of that task will feel its importance and value.
2. Reframe, reframe, reframe! Sometimes you need to do nitty-gritty tasks that take time and patience. For example, as a manager or company president you might need to improve your report, handbook, or manual writing skills. Again, this may not seem like an important task, but it has direct implications for behavior. When writing an executive summary for an annual report, you can make the difference between an investor or potential customer wanting to get involved with your organization, or getting bored and turning away. The potential to motivate someone through your writing is huge but many leaders don’t leverage it. Let’s reframe writing an executive summary: it’s an opportunity to welcome new funding and clients without any phone calls, paid advertising, and other marketing techniques. Now go rewrite it, and let the team know how important the document is to your overall strategy for lead generation.
3. Practice self-compassion. Often, we get caught up in our busy day and how it’s filled to the brim with competing priorities. To make matters worse, we judge ourselves for not doing better, working faster, and a host of other flaws we so easily find. As a leader, it’s important to motivate others, but our negative self-talk and lack of self-love may signal to our team that it’s alright to impose negative judgments. Consider stepping back, being mindful, and taking the role of your colleague or friend. What might this colleague or friend say to you in your stressful state? They might suggest taking breaks. Use that perspective to be more compassionate to yourself, and you will model that behavior to your team. Self-compassion is more important than self-esteem. Accepting our limitations helps reduce resistance to reality,so we can find and fill the skill gaps, ask for help, collaborate, and ultimately accomplish better work.

Examine your daily habits and find out how you could zoom out to the big picture, reframe the situation, and be more self-compassionate. Then watch how your team responds as you lead by example.

Enjoy the read? Take the next step and apply the learning.  Ask us how. 

As a leader, you can connect tasks to the bigger picture, reframe situations, and practice self-compassion to motivate your team. Photo by Paul Bence on Unsplash