“How often do we take the time to talk openly with our team?” is the powerful question at the heart of this reflection on leadership and communication.
Personal development specialist and author Karen Warren explores the importance of investing time in honest conversations with your team to build trust, psychological safety, and resilience. By celebrating successes, addressing challenges with compassion, and making space for open dialogue, leaders can foster stronger relationships and create a more effective, supportive working environment.
Do your team know that you value their work? Do they know that you appreciate their positivity and can-do attitude, their resilience to overcome challenges and great judgement to know when to escalate? Or do they know that you’re not happy with some aspects of their work? Things they’re usually on top of, but for some reason seem to have slipped. Do they know that you’re totally fed up with hearing them gossip in the office when they should be working?
As a leader, it can be difficult to factor conversations with your team into your busy schedule. You’ve got your own work to do. But by taking the time to regularly check in with your people, talk to them about what’s going well and not so well, and give them the time to reflect on their own performance, you can build trusting relationships and show that you’re invested in their development.
If you only talk to team members when there’s a problem, they’re less likely to be open and honest with you. They’re less likely to feel safe to adopt a reflective style which sometimes focuses on what they’re not so good at. They might not proactively escalate issues because they can see you’re busy and typically you don’t look to interact beyond their weekly progress report. If you don’t talk open and honestly to them, they’re less likely to reflect that back to you.
By talking to team members individually and in team meetings, you can demonstrate those qualities to lead by example. You can show that you’ll celebrate their great work and talk to them one-to-one to address any issues. If you address issues as they arise, you’re guiding the team member to improve. You’re showing them that you notice when things aren’t going so well and will prioritise the time to talk to team members to understand what’s difficult and help them identify a way forward.
With your own work to do, it can be challenging to secure the time for team conversations and sometimes that challenge will come from the wider business. Colleagues and senior people might prioritise their time over yours, if they see that you have one-to-one catch ups and team meetings in your diary. While there does need to be a level of flex on meeting availability, it’s important to show colleagues that you will prioritise your time with the team and stick to the arrangements you’ve put in place. There may be resistance initially, so try to balance a level of flexibility with a level of determination that those meetings won’t always be cancelled for other things.
Investing time for one-to-one and team conversations shows that you value the thoughts and opinions of your team and will prioritise time for open, honest, and authentic communication with them. By making the time available you can build trusting work relationships that support you all to work effectively, get through the difficult days and feel proud of your achievements.
You can build trust and create an honest dialogue with your team by talking about your values. This works well as a team meeting activity. You can start by asking everyone to identify their top five values; the things that are important to them. It can help to give people a list of values (which you can access via an online search) to get them started.
Encourage each person to share their thoughts about why the values are important to them but also be clear that they should only share information as they feel comfortable to do so.
Talking about your values is quite personal so it’s good to frame the conversation in that way so people feel safe and are more likely to contribute.
By investing in the conversations with your team, being honest to celebrate their work and challenge performance, behaviour and attendance issues with strength and compassion, you’ll make them feel safe to communicate honestly and openly too. Because they feel safe to be honest if things are difficult, they’re more likely to escalate issues to you proactively and not wait until a situation is getting out of hand. That makes your life easier, as you can anticipate and respond to smaller issues, so they don’t escalate to become bigger problems.
It does take time to have the conversations with your team, but the benefits of open, honest, and authentic communication are definitely worth the investment, to support the strength, resilience, and success of your business.
What will you do differently today?
Karen Warren (pictured) offers coaching, training and consultancy solutions to support employers and managers to manage performance, behaviour and attendance issues and with individuals and organisations to deliver a range of wellbeing, personal and professional development solutions. She is the author of ‘Workforce Wellbeing – how to build organisational strength and resilience’, which helps businesses to develop effective workforce wellbeing cultures, and has developed the online programme ‘Managing Difficult Conversations to Achieve Successful Outcomes’.
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