Jun 9, 2020
Hello there. Welcome to midweek motivate, where our goal is to build your leadership and give you something practical to try with your team.
We are in the final week of a six week coverage of the Six Daily Practices of Outstanding Leaders. So far we’ve looked at the importance of Reflecting, Inspiring, Developing, Connecting and Delegating. The final daily practice that we will explore today is Clearing.
Research I conducted early this year showed that 48% of people experience frustrations that impact their productivity at least daily. Those experiencing frustrations multiple times per day estimated their productivity at just 64% of what they could otherwise bring. 80% of those who experienced frustrations multiple times per day also said they frequently experienced negative work related stress. In summary, frustration are bad for your organisation, and even worse for your people. However people are often reluctant to voice their frustrations as they don’t want to be seen as negative.
Leaders can help by Clearing the way for their people. Such leaders undertake four activities:
- Identify frustrations - they work with their people to find out where frustrations exist. There’s no point in trying to ignore frustrations as that just makes things work. Take the time to actively seek out what’s getting in the way for people.
- Investigate cause and impact - sometimes we can’t change the cause of a frustration, but Clearing leaders recognise they can still reduce the impact of the frustrations on their people.
- Champion continuous improvement - we don’t need to fix everything overnight. If we help our teams to continuously improve each day, we can significantly reduce frustrations over time.
- Measure and communicate productivity - frustrations directly impact productivity. It can be incredibly helpful to measure productivity and share with the team the positive impact of removing frustrations.
I encourage you to talk to your people this week about frustrations that impact their productivity. If you want to review the list of actions I’ve included it in the show notes.