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Design For Ease Of Use, Leadership Card 22 – Growth and Contribution
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Engineering Happiness by Using Growth and Contribution
Researchers and business owners alike have found something incredible over the years, and that is that money is not always the answer when it comes to getting the best results from your team.
Sure, you could throw money at something to try and improve it – maybe approve a project, get the latest third party provider to work with you, give bonuses for performance or commissions for certain activities. But making happiness and engagement come from within has been shown to get far greater results.
People Want To Grow
There’s a great 30 second video by vlogger Casey Neistat that shows him on a treadmill, and says that life is like being on that treadmill. To stay in one place, you have to keep moving. If you stop moving, you actually fall behind, you don’t just stay in the same place. And to get ahead, you have to hustle – you have to run and you have to grow.
When you help the people in your team grow, by focusing on their strengths and enabling them to improve, stretch, and get better, then their happiness actually improves. And improving their happiness has an affect on your company’s bottom line, with up to 20% more productivity, and improved profit as a result.
People Want To Contribute
Growth isn’t the only thing that motivates your people from the inside out. Focusing on something bigger than they are – a larger goal that helps others – also gives people the motivation to do better and become more than they are.
It’s not always easy to focus on growing yourself, while also focusing on contributing to others, but if you can find a way to engineer both of these into your work, you will see some stunning results.
How To Do It, Practically?
So how can we do it practically, as a leader? Checking in with each person in your team at least once a week, and focusing on their strengths, has been proven to improve engagement by up to 27%. That means getting to know them, making the time to meet with them, and finding a way to use the strengths and passions they have to enable them to grow.
Doing that, you can also set stretch targets or look at ways to grow within those strength areas.
Contributing to others can be aligning your work and processes to how they meet the company’s targets, or how they meet the needs of your customers and the outcomes of helping them.
Most people aren’t aware of these things they can do as a leader to improve their team’s results. But doing these small things can make the difference between success and failure, and being a mediocre leader or a great one.
Chat soon – David McLachlan
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