Over the last few years, if not decades, we have believed that leadership is about control, KPIs, goals, achieving etc. However, often it seems we lost the human factor. We forgot, that as leaders we need to enable our team. If they miss their KPIs or goals, we need to ask ourselves where we failed them. Where did we not enable them enough.
- Did we give them the tools they needed
- Have we removed all stumbling blocks?
- Did we check on them? Do we know what is going on in their lives?
- Are they overloaded?
- Did we allocate the work to the right people, at the right time?
Servant Leadership
If we want to be #servantleaders, we need to work on becoming enablers, who deeply care about our team and help them grow in a VERY individualized approach.
Kindness is needed, coming from empathy (not sympathy). Here we recognize what the individual team member needs at this point in their live. We all have good and bad days, and so do our team members. Let’s see how we can help them perform better today!
Let’s aim at being intentionally kind to our team members, especially when they go through a hard time. This does not mean, we leave the focus on our goals behind. In my experience a little kindness, will help your team member through a rough patch and motivate them to even perform better afterwards.
As #leaders as well as #projectmanagers we need to motivate our team constantly. This means we are really in touch with them, we have build our relationships with them on a personal level and know what they need when.
Ruth Pearce, has written an amazing book called Be a Project Motivator https://projectmotivator.com/author/ – I think this is a good book to put on this year’s reading list.
Just some food for thought as we set our intention for the year