Ever find yourself wondering how to get more from your team in work? You know that they can do much better than they are but maybe some seem reluctant to contribute and others just take over and dominate?
Well in this week’s blog I’m going to talk about how to get your staff working for you to the best of their abilities.
We’ll be discussing:
> How to cooperate with people.
> How to work together in your workgroup.
> Why it’s so hard sometimes.
> What you can do about it.
I don’t know about you but in Sweden, we have times in school especially in high school, where you would do a lot of teamwork stuff and for me, it was always a struggle.
You had to pick the group in one way or the other. Sometimes you were assigned to a group with no choice and you felt it was a disaster because you didn’t like the others and you didn’t know how you would work together. This situation could end up in either of two ways; either you sat just quiet in a corner and let the others quarrel and struggle with the work or if you are a lady leader today you probably took charge and you were the one there doing the job and leading the way whilst the other ones were just sitting there.
The other scenario that could happen in school when it comes to selecting groups is that you were able to select your own teams among your classmates and everyone was happy. Everyone would pick the friends that were very like-minded and they would and you would have a great time working together.
You would love the work because you were chatting away and then you would complete work that was very like minded. There wouldn’t be many new insights and you could say it was a brilliant time but the work was boring and average.
As a group in real work life you still have the same problems and as a leader, you do get it a lot because you are in charge of the group and you are the one to have to get it to work in a perfect way.
The problem is that they usually want to do things the same way as they did in school. They want to work with like-minded people. That’s how they pick unless you teach them how to do it differently.
You have to teach them how to work with others in a constructive way.
I’m sure you often see this in your workgroup to and even though they do a great job or working together, you can see that they do not use everyone’s skills in the right way because they don’t cooperate in that perfect way.
I’m sure they work smoothly together but you want to get more out of them. This is where the secret of communication comes in. It’s not very hard if you learn a couple of basic rules about how we communicate with each other and what types of communication work with different people.
Science has shown that there are four different types of personality or personality types that communicate differently.
They also have what you could call their typical playing field where they feel comfortable, just like in school when you were up with like-minded people. The four different types don’t always agree with each other.
They might not even like each other because they don’t understand what the other people think. Sometimes they even think that the others are idiots but they’re not, they’re just different. This is pure biology and it’s nothing about right or wrong, it just is.
The system that I use gives each a personality type a colour to make it easier to talk about them and to separate them in a way.
They are:
Red – It’s about dominance. They point with the whole hand and they take no excuses.
Yellow – that stands for influence. These are the people want to have fun and they are very creative and come up with all those great ideas.
Green – they stand for stability. They want everyone to be on board leaving no one behind.
Blue – conformity, checking the rules, seeing that you work within the regulations and see that it is safe.
You need each one of these on a successful team because they balance each other out. They bring their special skills to the group and a group with all the four of them is working the best.
To be a great leader you need to know where you are as yourself on this communication field and then you also need to know where every one of your staff is situated to make it the best working team ever.
I have had several leaders with their work groups learning this system and understanding where everyone in their group is in this communication field. They are then understanding how others are thinking and they understand how they are thinking themselves on this.
They use the colors in the workgroup as a shared language because that can help resolve disputes and avoid disagreements.
My client Laura has said that it brought her so much closer to the worst antagonist in her work group. A guy worked for her who liked to try to be the boss sometimes and now she could say to him “oh watch out now you are being a little bit too red again. Remember I am the boss.” And then they could laugh together, but before they always had this hostile feeling between them and now they just laughed and could see what was going on, and that helped this workgroup so much to be the best in their field. So this is cool, isn’t it?
You can have the same!
I’d be happy to help you and your workgroup to be a great team and to have this great teamwork mood.
Just click the link below and we’ll connect.
Happy working.
