6 Psychological Strategies For
Building A Winning
Team Culture
To be an effective leader of a team in the business world, you have to know yourself as well as the strengths, motivations, quirks and downfalls of those working for you. You cannot prompt members of your team to be their most effective to through linear and one-way management. You have to be flexible and take risks yet be conservative when necessary. Most of all you must be someone the members of your team want to work for and impress.
Here
are six key strategies:
1. Know your own emotions.
To
be an efficient leader, you need to know how to manage your emotions.
Analyze yourself and identify what your trigger points are. These
trigger points will teach you when to act on an emotion and when
it's smarter to stay quiet.
Leading
a team involves managing a matrix of conflict and balancing
measures. You cannot lead effectively unless you can identify the
emotions in yourself and members of your team. If you do not know
your own emotions, you will not be able to effectively manage the
emotions of others. Having understanding and empathy will guide
you how to effectively lead others as well as yourself. The the
first person to manage is you.
2. Use the mind to manage feelings.
To
manage effectively, know that emotions are always more powerful than
the mind. When even the most rational people are confronted with
intense emotion, they loses the capacity to think straight.
Influential leaders understand the power of feelings. They know it is
the emotions and not the people they have to lead. Amid the turmoil
of events, maintain your presence of mind as a leader.
To
establish presence of mind, expose yourself to conflict and learn how
to work through the emotions involved to reach a resolution. The more
exposed you are to turmoil, the better you will be at seeing the full
story and rising above the smallness involved with some emotion. You
need to lead your team to see the big picture.
3. Understand the feelings of others.
Emotions
follow logical patterns if you know how to examine them. They rise
and they fall. When employees' negative emotions are triggered and at
their peak, effective management cannot occur and little to no
rational thinking can take place. Allow your employees time to calm
down and regain composure before you step in.
Should
emotions expressing excitement be involved, step in at the peak of
their intensity and push hard. This move involves the art of looking
beyond the present and calculating ahead. The passage of time can
bring learning and presence of mind. The use of timing is a great
strategy both for managing conflict and engineering movement.
4. Use emotion to move a team.
Different
emotions help people's thinking in different ways. Learn to navigate
your own feelings and spot emotions in employees by the signs
and patterns that reveal hostility or excitement. Once you have these
patterns in mind, be deliberate in how to use that emotion so
employees become more deeply motivated.
In
this way you can fill your employees with purpose and direction by
offering rewards at the end of a win or the close of sale. To ensure
continued motivation, be sure you follow through on the rewards
offered. Otherwise you will have motivated them to the reward stage
but instead built resentment when rewards don't follow as promised.
Effective managers live by their word and walk their talk.
5. Channel emotions effectively.
The
problem in leading any group is that people inevitably have their own
agendas. You have to create an environment in which employees do
not feel constrained by your influence yet follow your lead. Create a
sense of participation, but do not fall for groupthink so that
individual contributions are minimized.
Each
person you manage will require something different from you. Motivate
each individual in a specific way in an effort to make the whole team
better. Lead each individual to do his or her best while encouraging
the wholeteam to seek victory. Teach each person to focus on
goal, not to sweat the small stuff of others, and reward each
person's contribution to the whole.
6. Use sentiment to boost morale.
Emotions
determine experience and perception. To proficiently manage members
of a team, maintain morale by getting them to think less about
themselves and more about the group. Involve them in a cause. Let
them know how critical the closing of a certain deal will be and how
it will affect the company as a whole. The critical elements for
building morale are speed and adaptability, the ability to move and
make decisions faster than the team and painting that big picture in
such a way that employees want nothing more than to have
their victory.
Break
your team into independent groups of people who can operate on their
own. Allow each person to become infused with the spirit of the deal
or project at hand, giving that individual a mission to accomplish
and then letting him or her run. In this way you transform a goal
into a crusade.
Building
a winning team culture means managing yourself and others intuitively
and intelligently. This requires self-analysis and self-control.
Self-analysis enables you to understand yourself and other people.
The more a leader knows about emotion the better he or she will
be able to guide, inspire and motivate others.
- SHERRIE CAMPBELL, ENTREPRENEUR BI 141010
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