I want to tell you that this article is inspired by a visit we received a long time ago: Josep Guardiola, in the framework of the cycle called "Sports Leaders Conferences", spoke before hundreds of athletes, journalists, politicians and also businessmen about motivation, influence, teamwork and else.
This is one of the leadership phrases that were part of his conference “each person has a button, a key that makes him special. The coach's challenge is to find her and thus help everyone express their best version at work. ”
In your management as a leader, do you know how to recognize the key or special talent that each of your collaborators has? Do you know how to make that talent a unique contribution to your project?
Each team has its own challenge. Different members, sometimes not very homogeneous, their own cultures, personal expectations, experiences and emotions. And a common goal: bring the task or project to success. The leader's role is to set the course, motivate, control that they do not deviate from the objective and reach the goal. You can visualize a leader graphically behind her team (pushing, in English “push”) or in front (pulling her, in English “pull”). But what would happen if the leader were at the side, observing and looking for the key pieces on which to apply their capacity and skill, and thus leverage the team and obtain the expected results? I imagine this type of leadership with much less "effort" and much more "skill, cunning, intelligence".
These are the 3 keys that will help you to enhance the best of each member of your team, in order to leverage the group and obtain better results:
Discover what makes him unique, what his natural talent is: all of us have something that makes us special and that, putting it at the service of others, we can feel satisfied and full and also achieve a great contribution in a very natural way (and without effort). If you find what makes each of your collaborators unique, you will know what kind of tasks or responsibilities to assign to each one to maximize their contribution and achieve synergy in the team.
How to find out? Two techniques. The first, take a look at it: What kinds of tasks excite you when you set them out for yourself and which ones seem to only do them because you should? Observe how he connects with the rest of the team (especially when they are not working). He is communicative, he likes to explain and give details of what he did over the weekend or plans for the next vacation; is a social leader, harangue others to go out to lunch or to go for a drink after the office; He is a natural leader, influences others to do things his own way and shares his vision with his colleagues to try to make them see what he sees; He is organized and orderly, he has a hyper detailed schedule of his activities and results, he is always the first to deliver assignments and he never misses a date.
The last technique: ask him.
Find a way to develop it: Now that you know what talent each member of your team has, you must find what tasks or responsibilities you will delegate to them and how. If you have a member with natural leadership, you know that if you convince him, he will naturally be in charge of convincing others. Do you have a planner? Help him develop his talent by organizing the tasks of others and the dates of fulfillment of group objectives. Do you have a communicator ?, make sure that each guideline you have to download goes through his creative hands, he can make an art of what you have to say. Do you have a restless member who likes to be a protagonist? Give him an initiative to lead. He will do it with much more pleasure and will find time among his usual obligations because he is developing his leading role.Find each valuable member their responsibility or special task, and you will be leveraging the results of the project or the area, and in turn, leaving yourself room to be more in the overview of things. It is the secret of leverage (or leverage). You apply a little effort at a key point, and you get a magnified result.
Lean on his strength: you are a leader with many abilities and talents, but you don't have to do everything alone. There are always very valuable team members who can support you and make good weather, teamwork, and goal achievement not just your responsibility. Start today by deciding which task to give to whom. Sit down with him, explain why you have chosen him (tell him what you observed about his talent), tell him what contribution you think he can make to the team and what result they would get, tell him that you need to lean on him and that he can lean on you (Maybe he needs you to motivate him a bit and tell him what you think he has and what makes him achieve this, because you may have taken him by surprise and his talent is not something that he has taken into account - until now),Share your plan and the objective to achieve and ask him if he thinks that there is a different way to achieve the objective (listen to him, he has a special talent after all that could give you a different look on the way forward), diagram together a strategy to achieve it Put it into practice and then evaluate the results (celebrate achievements and learn from mistakes).
Don't wait for a perfect situation to start this change. Don't wait for the next project, the next team, the next quarter, or things get better (or worse). Put into practice what you learned today and you will master the art of leading sooner than you imagine.
