Stand In Your Power

The other day, one of my students posted a question related to the challenges he faces when interacting with his upper management. Steve, as I am going to call him, is a developer.

To me, it was clear all along that Steve is a good guy who wants to see things get better for all of his teammates. And my intention was to support his efforts by making him feel more powerful.

That didn’t go that well. As it turned out, Steve seemed to reject the idea of having more power. It became clear to me that he didn’t think he had any to start with.

 

So, what happened? – My conversation with Steve

Me: To answer your question I am going to focus on the part where you say you find it a challenge to convince upper management they need to support these activities on the clock, the reason being that this course is exactly about empowering YOU, so you yourself become an outstanding leader!

What you are saying is that you would like to become more influential, more powerful. If you have watched the lecture about power, being powerful is exactly about being able to impact and influence our work environment. And learning about power is the first step towards becoming powerful.

And learning about the horsemen and their antidotes, is a way to work on our emotional and social intelligences, which if you have watched the lecture about power, in turn adds to our personal power.

So, my suggestion to you is that you shift the focus from what management is doing to what you yourself can do. Saying upper management ‘doesn’t get it’ sounds a bit like finger-pointing to me, it is saying ‘it’s them, not me’. A horseman behavior, remember? 😉

Here are things you can consider:

  1. Regardless of your positional power within your organization, who can you build alliances with that could support you in achieving what you want?
  2. Can you mention upper management’s specific behavior and formulate a request?
  3. Don’t make things personal, focus on what the working relationship with your upper management needs, instead of focusing on who is doing what to whom
  4. Look at the part of the situation you can become responsible for changing even if it is only a piece of the whole pie. Focus on HOW you want to be regardless of what others do
  5. When it comes to the horsemen of toxic communication, Practice, practice, practice!!! :), you could become very influential and be the one to turn things around!

I’d like to add one last thing. I agree with you that things are easier when upper management is on board. As a consultant I am always elated when it is upper management that brings me in.

Steve: To be honest, I am not seeking to elevate my own power.  I am right where I want to be career-wise, and do not wish to step into a role higher up the ladder.  I’m really not looking out for my own interest or desires here, I am looking at factors that demotivate an entire team and thus make it harder for the entire team to be successful.  So in that sense, it’s hard to limit the focus to just myself.  A demotivated team affects everyone in the company.

At times I wonder why more employees don’t stick their neck out and provide straight feedback as to what is wrong?  My teammates privately discuss how demotivating this is, but they don’t want to speak up.  Maybe sometimes I speak up a bit too often — I find myself playing the sacrificial lamb that speaks for the team more that I would like 🙂

As far as whether my suggestions are heard — I’d have to say sometimes they are and sometimes not. But it seems like a recurring issue in multiple companies I’ve worked in.  I just wondered if there was a more effective way of trying to overcome this.

Me: Good to hear you are working on this material with an open mind. It is all quite new, so give it some time to sink in.

It was clear to me from the start that you want things to improve at the office for the sake of your organization. And it sounds to me that you want to be influential, that you would like to be able to influence the colleagues who are not speaking up and impact your upper management. That’s why I said it is my job to make you more powerful, regardless of your position.

Let’s review a couple of things so that this becomes clear:

1. Power is our capacity to impact and influence our environment

2. Some of our power is external (provided by the position we hold within an organization), some is grown and developed into our personal power.

3. Our personal power goes with us everywhere we go, it does not depend on context. By increasing our personal power, we become more powerful. Said differently, we become more capable of influencing our environment. Developing our emotional intelligence (for instance doing horsemen work and learning about power) is one of the ways to add to that personal power.

You will be becoming more powerful yourself regardless of whether you want to go higher up the ladder or not. By doing the work in this course, you will be able to impact and influence your workplace in new ways. Another benefit from this material is that you can stop focusing so much on what others do, and focus instead on how you want to be and what you can change yourself. Not depending so much on upper management to shape the workplace you want, isn’t that powerful?

 

Where Steve’s misconceptions about power are coming from and how to do things differently

Steve’s bias against power comes from three widespread obsessions:

1. An obsession with a traditional definition of Power as ‘power over’.

I work instead with a new paradigm of power that sees it as a continuum of 5 different sources of power playing out differently depending on the situation we are in. Positional power within an organization and personal power are two of these sources.

2. An obsession with positional power even though it is not the only power.

High positional power doesn’t necessarily go hand in hand with personal power, and someone with lower positional power can be equipped with a high dose of healthy personal power, capable of having a positive impact in an organization.

3. An obsession with leadership being a rank or a position.

It isn’t. Leadership is a choice and a service to be given. And our dear Steve is a born leader! He just has to sort out his issues around personal power so he feels comfortable (and powerful) influencing his upper management.

 

Final Thoughts – 360° Influencing 

Look at your biases against power. If you think ill of it or even hate it, the worse your use of it will be. Make a distinction between positional and personal power, so that even if you do not wish to climb up the corporate ladder, you can make a positive impact on your workplace. Team health is contagious and spreading this new disease across your organization very well makes you deserve being acknowledged as a leader. You can be of service spreading your superpowers up, down, across, and outside your organization.

 

And before I go, I would like to plant a seed…of empathy…

Not owning your personal power is the place where a frustrated employee and a boss can be alike. Have you seen bosses who don’t take decisions, allow others to derail the agenda, refuse to make the tough call or hold people accountable, and avoid solving team conflicts? These are bosses who sidestep their authority. They are high on authority but low on personal power, effectively having a negative impact on team morale.

If you are used to obsessing about positional power, how is it to see that a boss doesn’t necessarily *feel* powerful? Does this change in any way how you look at today’s workplace? Do you now perhaps feel more powerful yourself?

 

* * * *

Sonsoles Alonso – I help CxOs and Founders Build Highly Efficient Happy Teams in 6 Months or Less with the Right Hires, using Systemic Tools and Serious Games.
sonsoles@sonsolesalonso.com
www.sonsolesalonso.com

Are you in tech? I recently teamed up with top-rated instructor Mark Farragher for our online course ‘6 Tools To Improve Your Tech and Leadership Communication’.

Check also my 5-week online masterclass:
https://sonsolesalonso.com/break-free-from-the-assembly-line/

And my online class on Team Delegation and Leadership:
https://sonsolesalonso.com/team-delegation-and-leadership/

Would you like to read some other posts? My most successful one so far is The War Against Talent, with over 100000 views.

Giving Your Team Permission To Solve Problems

Putting Creativity at the top of the management agenda. 

The ability to create something novel and useful is essential to the entrepreneurship that jumpstarts new businesses and keeps successful enterprises in business after they have reached global scale.

Why isn’t creativity then, at the top of the management agenda?

 

Intelligence Quotient (IQ) vs Creative Intelligence Quotient (CIQ)

In its purest form, creativity means connecting the dots in unique ways to solve problems.
When looking at how artists step into challenges, the artist sits back, observes as unbiasedly as possible, allows an idea of how things could be to take shape, and takes action towards shaping that reality.

Whether building a new social media interface, learning to collaborate effectively, or landing on Mars, being creative means, in a nutshell, being a problem solver pur sang, unaware of the existence of any box.

In Steve Jobs’ words:

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.”

Does IQ matter, then? IQ shows the ability to gather knowledge and search for solutions within that frame of what is known. Creativity, on the other hand, is the ability to go beyond the IQ frame, capitalizing on seemingly random connections of concepts.

Therefore, if innovation is important to scaling your business, deliberately creating a company culture that is fluid and creative will be key to your success as a leader today.

 

If you solve problems (you are creative), you alter existing power dynamics

So, if creativity means problem solving, just saying organizations need to become more creative is not really going to work. Problem solving is actually not allowed in many organizations, employees not being given permission to tackle actual problems.

Now that you have heard about the horsemen and power use, we can safely say, solving problems at work can be unsafe. You could end up being blamed when things go wrong. Or even if you do provide a brilliant solution, your boss or someone else around you, could feel disempowered by your contribution. You could expose yourself to risk if you alter the power dynamics in an organization unaware of its use of power.

 

Leaders! Safety is a prerequisite for creativity

A (development) team is an open system (a group of people in a relationship of interdependence among both themselves and outside variables) that eats information for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and produces innovation (novel and useful solutions). As I mentioned before, if innovation is important to staying in business and scaling your company, creating a company culture that is intentionally fluid and creative is key to your success as a leader today.

If you are seeking innovation and yet not getting the results you desire, could that be saying anything about the working environment you have or haven’t given shape to? Could blame be at blame (yes, I like puns, not blame) for the outcomes you are collecting?

In a blame-based environment, team members often resort to never trying anything new, doing the absolute minimum to get by, and waiting until receiving direct orders from you, so their tracks are covered and they can divert the blame towards you when results end up being disappointing.

For this reason, the first step towards building a creative culture that loves to experiment and solve actual problems, is to create safety. Safety is a prerequisite for creativity. It’s a powerful tool, fit for real business environments, that you can leverage to drive innovation, excellence, employee engagement and ownership.

 

Manager, in helping the team (and your customers), you help yourself

Contrary to widespread belief among most management cultures, a safe work culture is not something that is owed to you. It is something you as a leader are responsible for both shaping and upholding. It is your responsibility to ensure that your team is safe from your actions (that team members do not feel used as your preferred go-to emotional management tool), and that your customers enjoy safety when using the products you make. This mindset is not about others making you feel safe, but about you making it your mission to make others feel safe. In turn, you become protected too when this healthy mindset spreads across the entire organization.

I hear you say, hm…safety? Does that mean immunity, absolution when things go wrong?

No.

The thing you have to keep in mind is, it is how you handle failures and mistakes that makes all the difference. Every time something doesn’t go according to plan, you and your organization have an opportunity to exercise your learning muscle. Whether you are facing smart, accidental or negligent failures, start by ditching the blame, and focusing on the learning and different possible responses.

See here a short guide on different types of failures and how you can handle them:

  • Smart failures: you want to expand the limits of what you know, and you plan actions and experiments carefully, keeping in the loop those who might be impacted by your actions. These are the mistakes that could propel you into leaving a memorable mark in the market, turning you into something better than you were before. You celebrate the team members that are able to experiment, fail, learn and handle recovery swiftly, and see them as an asset to your organization.
  • Accidental failures: they are part of doing business. Review what happened, derive action points to prevent these failures from happening again, and move on.
  • Failures caused by negligence or even malevolence: create a safe space and have a talk with the person in question. This could reveal unaddressed issues playing in the background. There should be consequences, but not from a perspective of blame. You focus your efforts on shaping a healthy and workable workplace.

 

Blameless Innovative Cultures

In blameless cultures, the focus is first and foremost on fixing issues, then making sure they don’t happen again. Team members readily admit to their failures and mistakes, and they feel safe to be transparent about both their strengths and their weaknesses.

Because no one is trying to save himself, learnings are shared across the company, and team members feel safe to share their weaknesses, employees raise their value to the organization as they go along.

 

A recipe for a creative environment

First, you sort out the safety issue.

Then add the following ingredients:

1. Darkness Principle (Watch my video)

The Darkness Principle says two things: 1. a single team member only has an incomplete model of a whole project, and 2. the best representation of a team is the team itself, with all of its parts, its members.

Besides, a team is an open system being impacted by a never ending list of external variables. For this reason, each team member will make you aware of a piece of the total complexity of a project that could otherwise go unnoticed.

The Darkness Principle is why you as a leader, want to be proactively interested in these 3 things:

  • Diversity – Think gender, race, ethnicity, personalities, styles, and different ways of perceiving and processing information.
  • Tapping ideas from all ranks – For the same reason. In a hyperconnected world in which employees have access to information from both within and outside of the organization, each team member will make you aware of a piece of the total complexity of the project that could otherwise go unnoticed.
  • Encouraging and enabling collaboration – Reality today is that most innovations draw on many contributions. Consider for instance the successful networked organizations of The Netherlands. They are not centralized and top-down. Team mates don’t do what they do because someone told them to do it. Contributing to an interdependent network is its own reward. And because each team member is exposed to different social networks, each one of them will bring an awareness of the total complexity of the project that is uniquely valuable towards the success of the collaboration.

2. Edge

Do you work out? In order for a workout to be effective, it has to hurt a little, it needs to take you away from your comfort zone. Do you want to master change, innovation and creativity? Become comfortable with the fact that discomfort is part of your success.

Providing your team with an effective workout doesn’t mean burdening them with insane amounts of work or unattainable deadlines. It means you want to provide your team with real challenges that are a little scary. As a leader you help your team find their edge by holding them accountable to big expectations while granting them a generous amount of autonomy to make their own decisions. The Darkness Principle will hep you create an atmosphere of resourcefulness that strongly supports creativity.

3. Reward risk-taking

Whether you are building your own company or someone else’s, you are taking a big risk. How about teaming up with mates who will take similar risks to help you further your vision?

Study the companies that inspire you. How many of them have achieved success by following tradition and sticking to the rules?

4. Encourage disagreement

Is the arguing in your workplace geared towards identifying the winner of a contest, or are you contesting to get to the essence of all the ideas present in the room?

Disagreement between team members is the foundation of debate and debate is exactly what you need to make sure your company is constantly putting its best foot forward.

5. Visually attractive environment

If you have worked on your safety and added the other ingredients in my recipe, splash with colour and personal expression! A drab-looking environment will not support your efforts!

How about costs? Experiments could be costly, I hear you think. Check my article ‘The Leader as a Service Designer: How to Deal with Uncertainty’.

 

* * * *

Sonsoles Alonso – I help CxOs and Founders Build Highly Efficient Happy Teams in 6 Months or Less with the Right Hires, using Systemic Tools and Serious Games.
sonsoles@sonsolesalonso.com
www.sonsolesalonso.com

Are you in tech? I recently teamed up with top-rated instructor Mark Farragher for our online course ‘6 Tools To Improve Your Tech and Leadership Communication’.

Check also my 5-week online masterclass:
https://sonsolesalonso.com/break-free-from-the-assembly-line/

And my online class on Team Delegation and Leadership:
https://sonsolesalonso.com/team-delegation-and-leadership/

Would you like to read some other posts? My most successful one so far is The War Against Talent, with over 100000 views.

Planning for Uncertainty: The Leader as a Service Designer

Uncertainty is inherent to software development and our uncertain world is more uncertain than ever… What happens to planning when everything goes to hell?

When looking at the marketplace from the perspective of power, we have been experiencing an earth shattering shift: from power being in the hands of the seller, to it being in the hands of the customer. From companies making and selling products and services that customers were predicted to want, to customers holding increased leverage in the marketplace.

As a leader, this is your chance to shine as a Service Designer

In a time when we speak more and more about organizations without managers, it would be understandable for you to feel insecure about your future as a leader. Good moment for you then, to become aware of the different roles you can embrace, so you can help your organization in the transition towards present-day effectiveness.

One such role is that of Facilitator. Another, and the one I will be focusing on in this post, is that of the leader as a Service Designer. Regardless of your formal tag, by embracing this role, in helping your team and your customers, you will be also helping yourself, providing yourself with continuity of employment.

Scaling in the Digital Era

Many businesses’ management structures and development teams today still look like an assembly line from the previous industrial era: they exist of pieces that do not communicate among themselves or with customers, they continue to worship tools and contracts that make neither the businesses themselves or their customers truly successful, and they insist on efficiency-centric management practices as if still able to rely on predicting what clients want and reproducing it in large quantities.

The truth is, clients do not want those products anymore. None of that is an effective strategy in the digital era, and definitely not in a volatile world. Building scaling businesses today asks for a different management paradigm, one designed to help enterprises adapt effectively to what is actually happening, in real time.

Successful management practices today include the client in the production process, empower employees, and leverage adaptive technologies and processes. This is not the time for more binary thinking, power being either in the hands of sellers extracting value from customers or in the hands of potential buyers that remain exactly that, potential buyers. This is the time for a new paradigm with seller and buyer co-creating value.

Thinking and Managing as a Service Designer

In the role of Service Designer, you:

  1. Understand building a product and managing a team exposes you to a complex system, and managing complex systems is not a zero sum game.
  2. Co-create value with your customers, as opposed to extracting value from them.
  3. Know people interaction is the game, interaction both within your organization and with the customer. You want to provide your team with as much access to data and customers as possible so they can learn and adapt as quickly as possible.
  4. Happily provide access to data. Today, data is a utility!
  5. Manage for outcomes, not outputs, while being aware that you are successful when your customer is successful as well. Are you building an app for your client and is the aim of your client to increase sales in a new continent? Only when sales go up for your customer in that continent, can you call yourself successful.
  6. Evolve towards a new type of contract that includes both features and outcomes, while emphasizing outcomes are more relevant today. Obsessing about features and specifications is previous era thinking. Yet another role for you as a leader, that of educator!

The Issue of Uncertainty: A Page From Other Industries

They say, if we see it, we can achieve it. Stress around uncertainty often pushes leaders to seek even more detailed requirements and specification documents, intensify command and control, and perpetuate hierarchies of authority, all of them practices of the predict-and-reproduce industrial era. This is an impulse that might seem difficult to stop, but trust me, it can be done. Others have done it.

There are at least two sectors that know how to navigate uncertainty successfully. Sense and Respond author Jeff Gothelf refers to military commanders’ ‘mission command’, a system of leadership that specifies what needs to be done but leaves the decision making to the people doing the fighting.

The other is the contemporary music world in the Netherlands, where contemporary music pros use a model of leadership based on graphic music notation. Just as in ‘mission command’, this graphic notation specifies what needs to be done, while leaving the decision making to the people doing the actual performance.

Whether it is a battle on the field or on the stage, ‘mission command’ and contemporary graphic notation are flexible systems that allow leaders and composers to set goals and objectives while leaving the decision making to the military doing the fighting, or the performers doing the performing. In the Netherlands this system of leadership has been extrapolated by the same musicians in order to create markets for high tech productions of contemporary music.

Final Thoughts

What does this mean specifically for you and your team? Two things: you specify the outcomes you seek without fixating on features, while giving team members substantial space to make their own decisions, and you get comfortable knowing that it is ok today to adjust plans as they are pursued.

If this sounds scary, remember that you as a leader, can navigate different levels of authority. There will be moments when you push and decide, and moments when you pull and align. Be mindful about this, and be deliberate communicating to your team in which situations you do one thing or the other.

What does this mean for you and your customers? From a perspective of power, by co-creating value with your customers you can be in the driver’s seat towards creating a healthier market, achieving continuity in business, and having clients that are not just potential clients, but real ones.

 

* * * *

Sonsoles Alonso – I help CxOs and Founders Build Highly Efficient Happy Teams in 6 Months or Less with the Right Hires, using Systemic Tools and Serious Games.
sonsoles@sonsolesalonso.com
www.sonsolesalonso.com

Are you in tech? I recently teamed up with top-rated instructor Mark Farragher for our online course ‘6 Tools To Improve Your Tech and Leadership Communication’.

Check also my 5-week online masterclass:
https://sonsolesalonso.com/break-free-from-the-assembly-line/

And my online class on Team Delegation and Leadership:
https://sonsolesalonso.com/team-delegation-and-leadership/

Would you like to read some other posts? My most successful one so far is The War Against Talent, with over 100000 views.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Team That Aligns Together Stays Together

Yes, we may all be created equal, but no, we are definitely not all equals when it comes to the workplace!

Organizations may believe adopting consensus mentality humanizes the workplace, making everyone feel a reasonable level of comfort. Nevertheless, even if there could be some merit in doing so, groupthink in the office is looking for equality in all the wrong places. Building a dream team has nothing to do with equality or agreement, but with competency, collaboration, effectiveness and productivity.

 


Consensus and its cousin, Groupthink, from a perspective of power use and communication style

Most organizations don’t understand the danger of consensus mentality. Here are some of the behaviors I have observed in consensus-based organizations:

  1. Disdain for dissenting opinions. This is contemptuous.
  2. ‘Us versus them’, vertically and horizontally, contributing to stratification and silos. This is stonewalling, in effect not being open to influence.
  3. Dumbing down those who contribute brilliant and original solutions. This is defensiveness. Defensiveness geared towards a false form of empowerment that ends effectively marginalizing those who are ‘different’, are experienced as a threat by lower performers, or challenge the status quo one way or another.

This brings us to other issues around power:

  1. No decisions being taken or taking very long to be reached. This is misuse of power by underusing it.
  2. Continuous search for mutual validation. This points to a lack of personal power.

Right there, power issues, and contempt, stonewalling and defensiveness. Those are three of what John Gottmann calls the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Behaviours that are so toxic that they have a deadly impact on communication and a team’s effectiveness.

 

Consensus mentality and Groupthink are very dangerous practices for two reasons

1. They stifle true innovation and adaptability to ever changing business conditions, contributing to possible extinction from the market. Where brilliant minds are silenced, the dialogue between business and market stops. How is it to be stonewalled by the market?

2. They promote unhealthy cultures and disempowered employees, effectively contributing to employee disengagement and loss of talent. Where effective communication and colour are taken away, the dialogue between employer and employee stops.  How is it to be stonewalled by today’s ever leaving employee?

Consensus thinking is devastating to all things effective and productive. What if we replace this quest for consensus with a quest for respect and appreciation for the diversity of what each employee brings to the plate?

 

From Opinion to Intention: The case for alignment and diversity

In successful alignment-fueled organizations, ‘different’ is simply a piece of new information, and ‘difference’ the place where insight lies. This is why truly innovative companies leverage gender, nationality/ethnicity, differences in ability, and different styles of cognition, communication and personalities towards products and services that leave a mark.

If we define consensus as unanimity of opinion, and alignment as unanimity of intention, an organization’s consensus culture can transform into being alignment-fueled by shifting its value focus from opinion to intention.

 

So, what is alignment?

Alignment can be defined as ‘bringing parts into proper relative position’. When it comes to teams and organizations, it means proper relative position of vision, expectations, roles, and resources.

Successful alignment doesn’t necessarily involve co-workers liking each other or agreeing with each other. A team can align around the need to accomplish a job together, finding a bite of the situation that becomes the common goal or interest.

How about conflict?, I hear you think. A team that is focused on finding alignment sees conflict as a creative act. They don’t argue for someone to win a contest. They contest to get to the essence of all the ideas present in the room. Conflict allows them to achieve a more innovative solution than either team member alone could on his own.

 

Regardless of formal tag, this is your chance to shine as a facilitator

Conflict only gets out of hand when there is no facilitator in the room. External facilitator? Internal facilitator? Regardless of formal arrangement, if you trust your skill to move team members from positions and personal agendas to a shared intention, you can support and empower your team by:

  • Modeling the attitude of deep democracy. This is an attitude of curiosity and openness towards unknown and marginalized experiences.
  • Becoming the holding container for the ambiguity, tensions, and visions of all the different team members
  • Engaging in a creative process with your team, leading them towards new and fresh innovations
  • Using a wide range of tools depending on the needs of your team. Teams with higher EQ and SQ might move positions quicker, other times you will need more time and more powerful tools.

 

Problems and Solutions: Groupthink Issues, and what you can do instead

  1. Drowned-Out Voices
    Let’s say you are planning an idea generation session for a new initiative and you use traditional Brainstorming. The overly exuberant will most likely drown out those who are more thoughtful and deliberate in their contributions.Use Brainwriting instead. It has 3 major advantages:1. Ideas are recorded the moment they pop up in everyone’s mind, no ideas being lost while waiting for a chance to speak.
    2. Ideas are contributed in private, removing the fear of being openly judged by others.
    3. Everyone contributes equally, regardless of personality type or personal agenda, so you can truly leverage the diversity of those styles and personalities, while at the same time doing away with office politics.
  2. The dreadful ‘This is How We have Always Done It’, focusing only on what is known.
    Think for instance of blind commitment to best practices disregarding critical information that has not been explored.Instead, appreciate the power of the question rather than the need to rush to answers. Next time you’re in a group meeting, start with, What problem are we here to solve? Keep testing often with, Are we still answering the right question?
  3. Over Confidence In Own Decisions
    Everyone supports a decision, so it must be right, right? It could be, but you don’t want to leave that to chance. One major effect of groupthink is that it leaves a team deceived into thinking the right decision has been made.Instead, keep in mind, if everyone thinks the same, then no one is thinking… Teams and their leaders can avoid this by embracing curiosity, seeking actively for real expression to take place, and spending more time in the question-asking phase, inviting new and fresh information before deciding on a step.
  4. Employee Disengagement
    Toxic communication, stratification and silos in your organization? Talent exodus is at an all time high.Instead, go 360 and break through groupthink. Design a cross-functional, cross-vertical ‘innovation’ team and invite your employees to connect to your organization’s strategic objectives. They will feel heard, a part of the organization’s growth, and most importantly, they will feel appreciated.
    And empowered.


Closing Thoughts

Would you like to leverage the power of diversity? The capacity to align is a vital part of it. In fact, the capacity to align is a critical team skill.

Instead of focusing on who is doing what to whom, successful teams focus on answering 4 key questions: What do we have in common? What is the overall objective? Why is it important to align? What would happen if we don’t?

 

* * * *

Sonsoles Alonso – I help CxOs and Founders Build Highly Efficient Happy Teams in 6 Months or Less with the Right Hires, using Systemic Tools and Serious Games.
sonsoles@sonsolesalonso.com
www.sonsolesalonso.com

Are you in tech? I recently teamed up with top-rated instructor Mark Farragher for our online course ‘6 Tools To Improve Your Tech and Leadership Communication’.

Check also my 5-week online masterclass:
https://sonsolesalonso.com/break-free-from-the-assembly-line/

And my online class on Team Delegation and Leadership:
https://sonsolesalonso.com/team-delegation-and-leadership/

Would you like to read some other posts? My most successful one so far is The War Against Talent, with over 100000 views.