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Design For Ease of Use with Lean CX – Leadership Card 10
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Giving Your Team a Purpose
There’s nothing worse than getting up at your alarm in the morning, getting the kids ready for school, downing a morning coffee and rushing in to work… only to have that work mean absolutely nothing in your broader life.
You’ve been there before, haven’t you? The work is either boring and too easy (or too hard), or too little or too much. It’s rarely ever Goldilocks – just right – and it’s almost never a part of your real dreams, passions, or purpose.
There’s A Lot Of Disengagement Out There
And the stats on this are pretty brutal. Nearly 67% of workers are disengaged at work – dragging their feet, making additional mistakes, and having significant time off before leaving altogether. But the research also shows that people want to do a good job, it’s usually leaders lacking in real team motivation, psychology and operational management skills that cause people to lose their engagement and their drive. Which makes sense, because no one really ever teaches you this stuff, do they? Especially not in an easy to use framework like the one from “The Lean CX Score” book.
Tying the outcomes of your team to a higher meaning has been proven to improve the engagement and purpose of your team, and the results they get. The good news it doesn’t have to be a fancy meaning like curing world hunger, it just has to be a meaning higher than the work they’re doing now.
Things like:
- Your work will have a direct impact on meeting our profit target in this way, or;
- The customers you help are impacted in that way, or;
- You are helping your broader team achieve something by doing your work, or;
- Even almost any “because”.
Just Saying “Because” Increased People Saying Yes By 93%
During a study by psychology Ellen Langer, she wondered what sort of words she could use to get people to let her cut in line before them at the copy machine.
She used many different variations and ways of asking, but it turned out that almost any reason was enough – the highest performing sentence included “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush?” with a 94% compliance rate. But just giving any reason also gave a 93% compliance rate, such as “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies?”
Just including a “because” in your request brings a different meaning to things – a meaning that’s not just all about you, or the other person in the moment.
So when you tie the outcomes of your team’s work to a meaning, give it some thought, but don’t overdo it. Don’t spend six months coming up with the perfect “meaning”, when a simple higher meaning will do. And then watch your team blossom just that little bit more, as the engagement within your team grows.
Chat soon – David McLachlan
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