[14] Build a Team Spirit to be Proud of in 2019

Improve your self-awareness and build a relationship of trust

The new year as always is a traditional time for goal setting and the winds of change. After the holiday break is a brilliant time for leaders to introduce new practices. Team members are receptive to change themselves having usually set their own new year’s resolutions.

Today I’m exploring a topic which I know can be completely mystifying to many of us – building an unbreakable team spirit. How do some leaders manage to get their team to do virtually anything for them? How do they, despite their weaknesses, manage to absolutely crush it?

Case study: Sir Alex Ferguson

Sporting case studies always translate easily to the world of business for obvious reasons. Many of the best motivational speakers in the corporate world were formally high achieving sports superstars.

One of the most famous and successful football (soccer) managers in the world, Sir Alex Ferguson, was at the helm of Manchester United for 27 years. During that time he transformed the fortunes of the club. He joined in 1986 when the team were struggling badly and they hadn’t won the league title for over a quarter of a century.

Fergie started in football as most managers do – as a player, moving into coaching at the end of his playing career. Prior to joining Manchester United Sir Alex had already seen great success with Aberdeen, where he and his team won three Scottish league championships.

Upon joining Manchester United, the early years were spent building a solid foundation and Sir Alex and the team’s stellar run of success started in 1990. In the following years until his retirement in 2013 they won 38 trophies. During this long era Manchester United of course had many different players. Sir Alex had managed to build an unrivalled winning team spirit and maintain it for an exceptionally long time with a continual rotation of players.

What do his former team members say about him?

“There are thousands of better coaches. But management? The handling of men? There’s nobody better.” Peter Schmeichel

“He’s a fantastic person. A human person. He taught me many things. He’s like a father in football.” Cristiano Ronaldo

“There was a unique harmony among the players and staff and there was no envy or jealousy as we were all pulling together. There wasn’t one day where we didn’t crack up with laughter – and the boss was usually the instigator.” Rene Meulensteen

“As a manager he was the best but his man-management was something which a lot of other managers would struggle to match. He knew how to speak to players, how to get a reaction. He’s the only manager that could leave someone out and make them feel good about it – he was incredible.” Wayne Rooney

“I am truly honoured to have been guided by the greatest manager in football and to have had the career that I had under him. Without him, I would never have achieved what I have done.” David Beckham

How did he do it?

A huge amount of analysis has been done on Fergie’s management style. The Geneva Business news put together a great list of five successful traits that business leaders can take from Sir Alex Ferguson, there is a link down below to access the full article but to summarise:

Self-confidence
Great communication skills
Team development and high standards
Honesty and integrity
Emotional intelligence

The theme that comes through from this list, from the other referenced literature, and especially from the quotes above, is that Sir Alex built a relationship of trust with each and every person he worked with. He was generous with his personal attention, and he invested time in them taking time to explain reasoning behind his decisions. They trusted him implicitly and he didn’t let them down.

The one thing you can do to build an unbreakable team spirit: build a relationship of trust

There are so many ways to build trust with your team, I’ve picked three to dive into today and will talk about others in future articles:

1. Get to know your team better

In order to create an environment where your team can perform to the best of their ability, it’s definitely necessary to get to know each of your direct reports on a personal basis.

Allow me to clarify what I mean by ‘personal basis’. I’m not implying that you need to be ‘pally’ with your team members, that is, overly friendly. Doing so can make difficult conversations that you may need to have in the future almost impossible.

Rather, I am referring to being approachable. Ensuring that your team members feel comfortable in opening up to you. They may or may not talk about their life outside of work and this is completely down to their discretion. You are looking to understand what drives them, their personality traits, and their career goals. You want them to be relaxed in your presence, and feel safe and accepted being who they are.

Look for common ground, mutual passions or interests and talk about these topics with them to build their comfort with you. In no time you will be working together in a well-oiled manner!

2. Ask your team to challenge you

When step one is under way it’s time for an arguably more difficult step which will require most of us to step outside of our comfort zones.

That is, to acknowledge that your team have specialist skills and knowledge which you need in order to succeed and ask their opinion on your proposed direction to see if they agree.

The aim is twofold:

Ensure you are self-confident enough to be challenged and open to possibly changing direction based on your discussion
Build trust in your team so that they aren’t afraid of coming to you with suggestions for improvements, or, if they note that drastic changes are required for success

This process can be hard to go through because it stomps all over the historical cultural norms of being the boss. Traditionally as the team manager, you would bring instructions to your team to be followed.

In today’s world this is an outdated approach. Allow your experts to do what they are trained for, and in the process make a meaningful contribution which will also increase their motivation.

In the spirit of this feel free to challenge me in the comments below!

3. Leave every conversation with clarity

Knowing where you stand at all times is very important in feeling comfortable in any situation.
Knowing what is expected of you at any given time is crucial to the timely delivery of successful projects.

As a leader it is your responsibility to make sure that all parties are clear on what the stakes are, and what needs to happen next.

Take a leaf out of Alex Ferguson’s book and make time to explain reasons for decisions you have made to ensure your team are on board. If they understand the rationale it will be so much easier for them to contribute, even if they don’t necessarily agree. You will also be able to detect, broach, and deal with any rumblings of discontent.

Finally, if action or deliverables are required of your team members, be really clear about what they are and when they are due. If you get the sense they don’t understand or are not on the same wavelength, ask them to repeat it back to you.

Applying these three actions will definitely help to build a culture of trust within your team. In order to get to a place where you can successfully execute on these you may also require some personal growth.

The one thing you can do for yourself in 2019 – grow your self-awareness

Let’s take a deeper dive into self-awareness first, I have written about self-awareness before as I see it as one of the cornerstones of emotional intelligence and thus imperative to being a great manager.

Why is being self-aware so crucial?

I was buying groceries just a few days before Christmas. Even though it was a weekday the store was busy as customers were rushing around trying to find the right sized turkey and all the trimmings.

I generally hate grocery shopping, so I usually combine it with one of my favourite habits just to take away the drudge factor – people watching. As I walk around the store I overhear snippets of conversation and observe behaviour and relationships. It helps me to pass the time and is mildly entertaining.

On this particular trip as you can imagine the store was hectic. People were grabbing last moment gifts of toiletries, chocolates, cookies, and all their supplies for the festive period. It was a bit of a scrum. Most people were trying to keep out of the way as they piled up their carts, clearly aiming to get in and out as fast as they could and weaving around the slower, more bewildered-looking shoppers.

Egg-person

There was one person in particular that I noticed – I’m going to call her the egg-person. Every shopping trip I have ever been on – except in some of my late night grocery dashes – has an egg-person. The egg-person exists in every town I have lived in, and every country. I swear – they are everywhere!

In the past egg-person might have been someone who would have irritated me. I first saw her – yes you guessed it – by the eggs. She was already well entrenched there when I turned onto the dairy aisle (more of a huge wall at the back of the store) and was still there when I left several minutes later.

The egg section happened to be about the length of her shopping cart. There was plenty of room around her, yet her cart placement blocked the entire section. This is usually acceptable for a few seconds as you walk by and grab what you need. But blocking the entire egg section, or any section for that matter, for about 5 mins in a busy supermarket on the run up to the holidays is going to annoy people.

She was oblivious to the needs of others

I watched her stand there oblivious to others around her who were trying to get their eggs. They tried different techniques to get her to move. Someone even nudged her cart, trying to get it out of the way. Despite the bump she didn’t notice and still had no idea that she was getting in the way of so many people.

This is a trivial example. It does however illustrate what can happen when people get wrapped up in their own world and fail to consider the needs of those around them.

Low self-awareness in people managers

In the workplace, managers with low levels of self-awareness can unknowingly make life miserable for their team members. This may be through overestimation of their own skill levels – they think they’re a great manager. Or, other factors such as poor judgement, or inappropriate and biased behaviour towards others.

Their inability to see what they are doing will often mean that unsatisfactory conditions continue. In the short term the team might try to paper over the cracks. Eventually the resulting circumstances and actions will breed resentment towards the manager, lack of respect, and disengagement amongst team members. The effects of this are very damaging. Teams cannot perform at their best under these circumstances.

Self-awareness is a crucial trait of excellent people managers

Tasha Eurich, notable expert in self-awareness, stated in her recent interview with the Harvard Business Review that “self-awareness is the most important skill to be successful in the 21st century at work”. She goes on to confirm that “there’s some data coming out that self-aware leaders actually lead more profitable companies”. Need I say more?

Put simply – the ability to influence and get the best out of others requires first that you can understand and moderate your own behaviour. Self-awareness, not self-absorption.

Are there different levels of self-awareness?

Tasha’s research revealed that there are a couple of different types of self-awareness and both are needed in order to be considered as an overall self-aware person.

Internal self-awareness – I like to think of this as knowing yourself, your thoughts and feelings, your personality traits and preferences.

External self-awareness – understanding the way others see us. There is only one way to understand this and that is to hear honest feedback from others.

The internal and external assessment together give a picture of the level of our self-awareness. The external feedback is required to ground our own assessment in reality.

Complications with self-assessment

Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It: “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool”.

My personal interpretation of this is that if we are not sure where we roughly are on a scale and don’t have a reference point for what ‘good’ looks like, we can easily over or underestimate our own abilities.

If you’re familiar with the four stages of competence pyramid this would equal the bottom layer – unconscious incompetence. At this stage we don’t know what we don’t know, consequently we can even fail to understand the value of the skill.

Psychologists Dunning and Kruger extensively tested this through a number of research studies and confirmed that experts usually self-assess themselves with better accuracy than novices do.

They also confirmed that cultural differences can impact self-assessment. One of their studies explored the difference between self-assessment in Japan versus their previous North America based studies.

The Johari Window – a practical way to assess yourself

Psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingram created the Johari Window technique in 1955 to help people to better understand their relationship with themselves and others. This technique is almost 65 years old at the time of writing this article but nevertheless I think it is a practical and useful exercise to complete as part of your self-awareness self-assessment. It is a really quick and easy way to gauge your thoughts about yourself against how others view you. A brilliant reality check.

There is even a really cool online tool developed by Kevan Davis, that you can use to do the full assessment. Once you have done your own part you can send a link out to friends, family, and colleagues for them to do their part. When I tested it I had 90% of responses in just a few minutes.

You start by entering your name to get your unique link. Then you choose the top five or six words that best describe you from a list of adjectives. The site will give you two URLs, one to monitor for updates and one to send out to those who you want to assess you.

Here is the link: kevan.org/johari

What results will you get?

Your unique link will take you to a grid which collates all the responses. If you choose words that others don’t pick, they will be listed under ‘Façade’ as they are known only to you. If you and others pick the same words, they will be listed under ‘Arena’. Any that you don’t pick but your assessors do, will be added under ‘Blind Spot’.

You can see how many votes were recorded for particular words and who chose each. Below the grid you will see a list of dominant traits based on the number of votes for each word plus the full list of all percentages, and a breakdown of words chosen by each person.

For me it was pretty accurate and I had quite a lot of crossover with the values chosen by others. Let me know in the comments how this exercise goes. I would dearly love to hear about it.

How can you improve your self-awareness?

Now we understand the value of being self-aware, and we know how to measure it (a starting point at least). The next step is improvement. I believe self-awareness is something you can always improve or at least it’s something you should always practice to ensure you stay sharp.

Fly on the Wall / Micro self-reflections

One of my own personal methods of improving self-awareness is a drill I call the ‘fly on the wall’ or ‘micro self-reflection’ technique. The idea of it is to almost as if you were a fly on the wall, observe your own behaviour in the moment. For example, when you’re working in a group setting, or giving a motivational speech to your team.

Essentially it is a heightened state of self-consciousness, when you pay attention not just to what you are doing, but how you are doing it, and, how people react.

Obviously you need to be present in the moment so this is something you need to be careful with. Ensure you pay full attention during your meetings and conversations. Becoming distracted by trying to assess your own self-awareness will obviously have the exact opposite effect to what you’re looking for.

Use the ‘free time’ you get in meetings for micro self-reflections

What free time you ask? The key to this is in the word ‘micro’. I’m talking about any moment you are not actively speaking or actively listening. There is nearly always a second or two, right after you finish talking, to very quickly observe what just happened.

All you’re looking to do is see how the other people reacted to what you said or did.

Think about how you said what you said, or how you did what you did. This should be really easy and take no time at all, you may even have planned how you would play the situation in advance.

Make a very quick mental note of whether it worked or didn’t work. Then, quickly get back to the meeting.

Get accustomed to doing this

The first thing you need to do is get used to doing it. Don’t even worry about the follow up in the first instance. Just get used to observing how you do what you do while in the act of doing it, and then right after, what reactions you see.

A very simple assessment of the reactions – good, bad, indifferent – is good enough.

When you do this often enough it will start to become automatic. It’s at this point that you will notice a natural reflection process start to happen both during and after the meeting.

How to follow up

You’ve been practicing your micro self-reflections for a while and it’s starting to become second nature. What are the steps for follow up?

Conduct a brief review following each meeting and note down any salient points:

What did you learn about your colleagues – what did they respond well to? What didn’t they respond well to?
Did you achieve your objective?
If not, was the reason you didn’t related to your approach?

Briefly think about anything you might do differently if you were to do it again
Celebrate your wins, take a moment to acknowledge a great outcome, especially if you feel you made it happen through the way you behaved
Move on quickly

DON’T

Over analyze – it’s essential that you don’t get into a spiral and spend time analyzing every single detail, a quick lessons learnt session is all you are doing
Beat yourself up if things didn’t go well – you can’t go back and change what happened, you must simply become aware of it, and learn for next time

If this is the first work you have done towards increasing your self-awareness levels then you will have definitely made significant progress.

In a future article I will go into more detail about applying the lessons you have learnt about your own self-awareness through self-regulation.

I would love to hear from you about your journey to increased self-awareness. Please leave me a comment or engage with me on social media using the links below. I want to hear about anything that surprises you and we can compare notes!

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