4 Questions for Team Leaders as 2023 Ends

As 2023 draws to a close, you might find yourself in a whirlwind of year-end tasks, deadlines and holiday preparations. In the middle of all that, you might not have had the chance to take a step back and assess the broader picture of how your team is faring. But as we approach the new year, it's crucial to set aside time to reflect. Taking a pause to evaluate the collective journey of your team over the past year can provide invaluable insights on the path you should take going forward. Use these questions to help you take the pulse of your team and identify what they might need from you.

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What does your team’s stress level look like? As a leader, it’s crucial to recognize the symptoms of burnout on your team and to address them quickly. The effects of long-term stress (which we’ve all been experiencing!) can show up in different ways. For example, you may have noticed that your team members don’t seem as focused as they used to, or that communication feels strained. If your team members are showing signs of burnout, affirm your commitment to their well-being and look for ways to address the situation. Do you need to adjust workloads, deadlines, or the pace of work? Do team members need more support to navigate any changes or uncertainty? 

How can you help team members manage their energy? To address stress and burnout, you can also ensure that team members have the resources they need to maintain balance and sustain high performance. Leaders play a pivotal role in fostering a supportive environment that encourages overall well-being. Encourage healthy habits like regular breaks, setting boundaries between work and personal time, and actually using vacation days. And don’t forget to lead by example: If you work around the clock or don’t take breaks or vacations, your team members will assume that’s what you expect of them (no matter what you say).

How clear is your team on what success looks like? Since the beginning of 2023, a lot may have changed in your organization. Priorities and expectations have shifted; new challenges and opportunities have emerged. You may assume that your team knows what’s most important now. But, in times of rapid change, sometimes key messages about priorities get lost in the busyness of our day-to-day work. So, take some time with your team before year-end to talk about priorities going into 2024. Connect the dots for your team members about how their roles fit in and affect those priorities. Make sure each team member knows the top areas where they should focus to have the biggest impact on the business and empower them to focus on those “big three.”

Is there a need to upskill your team? If you have observed performance issues in your team in 2023, ask yourself whether they have the skills and training necessary to succeed. Over the past few years, so many organizations have gone through resignations, layoffs and restructuring, leaving their employees grappling with new roles or evolving responsibilities. Beyond that, if staffing is lean and workloads are heavy, your newer team members may have received little to no onboarding. But even your seasoned employees may need additional training if they’re taking on different types of projects. We’ve definitely seen these struggles and created the New Lens® app to address them while making it easy to fit development into busy schedules and tight budgets.

This week, I challenge you to identify one area to focus on with your team in 2024, and one or two initial steps you will take. This small investment of time will yield big payoffs in the coming year.

How to Strengthen Team Relationships with Collaborative Learning

As a firm that helps top organizations develop their leaders, we get a firsthand look at emerging trends in learning and development. Three years ago, the coronavirus pandemic caused a sudden and massive shift to remote learning options. But, in recent months, we’ve been seeing the pendulum swing the other way.

In-person learning programs are on the rise again. One reason? Remote work has decreased the sense of connection among employees. Two-thirds of remote workers report feeling isolated or lonely at least part of the time. More than half of hybrid and remote workers also report having fewer work friendships.

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We’re seeing especially strong interest in collaborative learning. This article will help you better understand collaborative learning, its benefits and how you can implement it in your organization.

What Is Collaborative Learning?

Collaborative learning is centered on employees sharing their knowledge and expertise with each other. It can take many forms. For example, if your organization has a program that pairs employees for mutual mentoring, that’s collaborative learning. Affinity groups or employee resource groups can also create opportunities for employees to learn together.

Embracing collaborative learning doesn’t mean that you solely rely on your employees’ expertise, though. For example, our New Lens® app delivers bite-sized lessons on key leadership skills and gives options for learning with a cohort. Our WOW! Program℠ also utilizes the power of collaborative learning by combining audio lessons with in-person meetings.

What Are the Benefits?

At Newberry Solutions, we’ve seen organizations that provide collaborative learning reap a number of benefits:

• First, relationships among employees get stronger, which is especially important in this new era of remote work. Even before the pandemic, I frequently advised clients to pay more attention to their peer relationships (not just relationships with their bosses or direct reports).

• Feelings of isolation decrease. Instead of feeling alone in dealing with an issue, employees feel like their challenges are shared and that they can lean on each other.

• Collaborative learning can feel more relevant. Both employees and employers are tired of training programs that fail to address what they experience at work. Whether you are using outside content (such as the New Lens® app) or not (as with an internal mentoring program), collaborative learning focuses on effective solutions for your organization,

• Learning becomes more accessible. With how busy everyone is, it can be hard to get away for a conference, offsite or other event. Collaborative learning sets the stage for what The Josh Bersin Company calls “growth in the flow of work.” This kind of learning can happen every single workday.

Put Collaborative Learning into Action

This week, I want to challenge you to look for ways to drive collaborative learning for your team. Could you put them together in small groups to share their expertise? Or perhaps you could team up with other department heads to help your teams get to know each other and learn about each other’s work. We’re also happy to tell you more about our New Lens® app or WOW! Program℠. Just reach out for more info.

Are You Leveraging Your Coaching Skills?

In the past few years, we’ve seen a big shift in expectations for leaders. Previously, leadership largely followed a “command and control” model. Leaders figured out what to do and told others to do it. But today we value a new kind of leader — one who’s skilled at coaching employees to find their own solutions.

“Increasingly, coaching is becoming integral to the fabric of a learning culture—a skill that good managers at all levels need to develop and deploy,” Herminia Ibarra of London Business School and leadership trainer Anne Scoular wrote in Harvard Business Review.

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Honing your coaching skills benefits your team members and the organization as a whole, as well as your own career path. (In fact, we believe so strongly in the power of coaching that we created the New Lens app to make coaching easier for leaders and more accessible to employees at all levels.) In today’s article, I’ll help you assess where you are now with your coaching skills and how you can coach more frequently and more effectively.

How Coaching Pays Off

As an executive coach myself, I can tell you that coaching delivers real results, including:

• Greater self-awareness

• Improved critical thinking skills

• Less turnover (94% of employees would stay longer at a company that helps them learn)

• Improved engagement and motivation

But providing regular coaching can be a challenge for managers. With recent workforce cuts at many companies, schedules are tight. Furthermore, according to Chief Learning Officer, managers may lack the skills to be effective coaches: “Most managers are hired or promoted based on their tenure with the organization or past experience in non-managerial roles. They’re chosen based on legacy rather than skills. They may have what it takes to run the business, but they often lack the ability to support, motivate and empower a team.”

The Definition of Coaching

To strengthen your coaching skills, let’s take a look at how often you’re currently coaching. To do that, we have to first understand what coaching is — and isn’t.

The International Coaching Foundation defines coaching others as “a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.”

This definition of coaching from tennis coach Timothy Gallwey also applies to coaching in the workplace: “"Coaching is unlocking a person's potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them."

Many of the common interactions we have with our reports do not qualify as coaching, including:

• Telling someone exactly what to do.

• Giving them advice on what to do.

• Offering them performance feedback.

Instead, coaching is more about listening and asking powerful open-ended questions to help someone else challenge their thinking, broaden their perspective and get unstuck.

Based on these definitions, how are you doing as a coach to your direct reports? How often are you asking coaching questions vs. giving directions or providing feedback?

Listen and Ask Questions

Now let’s think about how you can coach more frequently. A good starting point is to keep an eye out for coachable moments as they arise during your day. You don’t have to coach constantly. It’s not the right solution in every situation. For example, in a high-risk, high-visibility scenario, it’s probably safer to give direct instructions in the moment and then coach later.

When you identify good opportunities for coaching, remember to practice active listening. Pay attention to what your direct report is really communicating and don’t just wait for your chance to talk. By listening deeply, you can identify questions that can help employees develop their own solutions. A common mistake here is to ask leading questions that are more about nudging the person to the solution you would choose. Instead, your questions should sound more like these:

• “What’s most important to you about this issue?”

• “What problem are you really trying to solve?”

• “What have you tried already, and what did you learn from that?”

A New Way to Coach

In addition to the coaching you provide, you can also look for other ways to offer your team members more coaching. Technology now makes the benefits of coaching more accessible than ever. Our New Lens app, for example, can supplement your own coaching with content that’s targeted to common situations we’ve seen our clients face. Schedule a demo now.

Where to Start When Choosing a Leadership Training Program

As this year winds down, you’re probably starting to think about what 2023 will bring and how you can help your team meet the challenges ahead. As a leader, you play an important role in ensuring that your team is ready to tackle current and future challenges. You may also have heard from your team members that they want more training and development opportunities. But with so many options available, how can you identify the right leadership development solutions? Today I’m kicking off a series of articles about how to do just that.

This week, we’ll focus on understanding what your team needs. With so many fires to put out every day, it may have been a while since you holistically assessed how your team is doing. By pausing to do so now you, you can make a more informed choice when it comes time to select leadership development training. Give yourself some time to think through these seven questions.

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1. What has your team been through in the past year? What are they going through right now? Changes and challenges have been coming so rapidly that you may have lost track of everything that has happened. How have economic changes, technological disruptions and societal disruptions affected your organization and your team?

2. Are you seeing signs of stress and burnout? If you notice that your team members are making more mistakes or missing deadlines, you may assume that some are underperformers or that they’re “quiet quitting.” But such behaviors can also be a sign that they’re overwhelmed with stress and fatigue. Burnout rates just keep rising, so it’s essential for all leaders to recognize the signs and symptoms of burnout on their team.

3. How are your team members showing up? Observe your team members in different situations. Every interaction either elevates or diminishes their individual leadership brands. Are they sending messages that align with who they want to be?

4. How are your team’s relationships? To succeed, your team members need strong networks. But, for many people, relationship building suffers when they get busy or when they work remotely. Is everyone just keeping their head down to get things done? Or are they cultivating relationships with each other, with colleagues in other departments and with leaders at different levels?

5. How are your team members communicating? One of the most important leadership skills for your team members to develop is the ability to communicate with influence and impact. How would you describe each person’s communication style and approach? Do you see any common themes? Pay special attention to whether your team members become less-effective communicators when they are stressed out.

6. Are your team members focused on the right work? With everyone so busy, knowing how to manage your energy and capacity is an essential skill. Do your team members prioritize the work that will have the most impact? Or do they seem distracted and scattered?

7. Beyond what we have already covered, what other themes do you notice?

What’s Ahead in This Series

I hope that this exercise has given you a clearer picture of what’s going on with your team now and the biggest needs a leadership program should address. In upcoming articles, I’ll talk more about defining the outcomes you want from leadership training and what effective leadership training looks like. In the meantime, explore one of our newest leadership development solutions, the award-winning app New Lens. It focuses on areas where people get stuck and strategies that drive high performance, and is designed to fit into tight schedules and build relationships in the process. Schedule a demo now.

How Does Your Leadership Impact Team Performance?

When I speak about high-performing teams, I often cite these key things any leader should think about:

1. Connecting the Dots

Remember that as a leader, you are always in the invisible spotlight. People are watching, listening, and constantly drawing conclusions about what it all means. Proactively communicate how you measure success and consistently Connect the Dots between your actions and your underlying intent. The more you do this, the less others will misunderstand your expectations and desired outcomes.

2. Set the right tone

Are you a leader who shields your group from the pressures that come from senior executives, or does it filter straight through you to your team? Recognize that how you show up sets the tone for the team. What do you look and sound like when you are under stress? Ask someone to give you feedback if you are unsure. Be mindful that your energy, positive or negative, can be contagious.

3. Create a clear line of sight

Help others see how what they do on a daily basis ties to the bigger picture. Give them specific feedback that allows them to understand how they are making a difference in the context of the overall business strategy and direction. To take it one step further, point out what they should keep, start, and stop doing to be more effective.

Think about how you want to show up and how you want others to view your leadership. Spending even a minute to consider this will help you take a more strategic approach.

© 2013 Neena Newberry | All rights reserved.

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