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Newsletter
260
October 23, 2012 |
In
This Issue... |
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| Your
Team -
Positive? Happy? Excellent?
To perform excellently, your people
need to be positive, happy, and focused.
Focus is the subject of another
newsletter, but how positive and happy are your people? And could you do more to
access the creativity and productivity that come with these?
In
this week's featured article, we look at how you can build a positive
and highly effective team.
We then explore how you can
rebuild morale where people are unhappy, and we see how you can
use Positive Thinking to develop a really positive attitude.
This is something that's sure to "rub off" on your people!
Enjoy the
newsletter! | |
|  | |
| James Manktelow and Rachel Thompson
MindTools.com - Essential skills for an
excellent career! | |
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| Featured
Resources at Mind Tools |
Building
a Positive Team
Helping Your People be Happy and
Engaged
Positive teams accomplish far more than teams with low
morale. Find out what you can do to build one. All
Readers' Skill-Builder |  |
|
Rebuilding
Morale
Creating a Happy, Committed
Workforce
Team morale can take a knock due to downsizing,
restructuring, or poor leadership. Learn how to rebuild your team's morale and
encourage a positive outlook. All Readers' Skill-Builder |  |
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| ...
And From the Mind Tools Club |
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Self-Determination
Theory
Enhancing Self-Motivation by Meeting Basic
Needs
Discover three basic needs that, when fulfilled, lead you to
feel motivated, engaged, and purposeful in your work.
All Members' Skill-Builder |  |
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Reeder
This app helps you get the most out of RSS subscriptions, so that you
can keep up-to-date with developments in your industry. All Members' App
Review |  |
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Your Virtual Career Network
Join
thousands of like-minded professionals in the official
Mind Tools
Club.
Get career advice, ideas, training and
support in a thriving online community of excellence.
Find Out More |  |
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Editors'
Choice Article
Building
a Positive Team
Helping Your People be Happy and Engaged
|
Have you ever been part of a highly-motivated, high-morale
team?
If you have, chances are that most days you were happy coming in to
work. You had fun collaborating with your colleagues, and, together, you were
able to come up with some great ideas. Because of your focus and enthusiasm, you
probably did some of your best work with this group.
Teams that are
highly motivated and positive are not only fun to be part of, but they also
accomplish far more than teams that are struggling with morale. |
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Positive teams accomplish far more than teams with low
morale.
©
iStockphoto/digitalskillet |
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This is why it's so important that, as a leader, you strive
to build a positive team. In this article, we'll show you how!
The Benefits of a Positive
Team
Research shows that positivity can make a real difference to
people's success and well-being.
In one study, researchers
found that happy individuals are then more successful in many areas of their
lives, especially in their careers, compared with individuals who struggle with
happiness and positive thinking.
Other studies show how much of an
impact positivity has on people's ability to think creatively, progress their
careers, cope with challenges, and work with other people. Positivity is an
essential ingredient for success!
Positivity also brings longer-term
benefits. Barbara Fredrickson, professor and social psychologist, created the Broaden
and Build Theory to explain how positive emotions can broaden our behaviors
over time. According to Fredrickson, the more positive emotions we experience,
the likelier we are to exhibit other positive behaviors, such as curiosity,
awareness, discovery, and creativity - all essential for successful innovation.
In short, the happier we are, the more creative we are, and this is true for
individuals as well as for groups.
Becoming a Positive
Leader
Teams often become more positive because they have a
positive leader. This is why focusing on your own happiness, well-being, and
emotional intelligence is the first step in creating a great team.
Martin
Seligman, a leading positive psychologist, developed the PERMA Model to
highlight the five essential elements that you need in order to be happy. PERMA
is an acronym that stands for:
- Positive emotion.
- Engagement.
- Positive Relationships.
- Meaning.
- Accomplishment/achievement.
Start by thinking
about how you can increase each of these elements in your life. Spend some time
reading our article on PERMA
and then take action - the more of these things you can bring to your life, the
happier you'll be!
Next, stop and think about the work that you do. Do
you know what your strengths are? And how often do you get to use these
strengths?
Our work is most satisfying when we can use our unique
abilities in a way that makes a real difference to someone else, or to our
organization. First, conduct a Personal SWOT
Analysis to discover your strengths. Then, use the MPS Process
(MPS stands for Meaning, Pleasure, and Strengths) to see how you can use your
strengths to bring more meaning and pleasure to your career.
Last, work
on your emotional
intelligence. Emotional intelligence is a vital leadership skill, because it
gives you awareness of your own emotions, as well as for the feelings and the
needs of others.
Emotionally intelligent leaders understand what their
emotions are telling them, and, because of their inner strength and awareness,
they don't take out their own negative emotions on their people. This is
definitely a skill that you should cultivate if you want to lead a positive
team!
Removing Obstacles
to Positivity
Before you can encourage positivity in your team,
you need to remove any obstacles to it. By doing this, you can ensure that your
team won't start getting motivated and then run into a series of roadblocks;
this start-and-stop progress is dispiriting, and it can quickly undermine your
team's sense of motivation.
Herzberg's
Motivator and Hygiene Factor Theory gives you a great starting point for
working on motivation. Psychologist Fredrick Herzberg discovered that employee
satisfaction and dissatisfaction are not opposites. For your team members to be
satisfied in their jobs, you must first remove the causes of dissatisfaction,
and then add factors that contribute to satisfaction. Both of these steps need
to take place for your team members to feel truly happy in their
work!
For example, are there policies in your organization that could be
causing dissatisfaction for your team members? Is each person's salary
competitive? Would your team members be happier if you provided cross-training
opportunities, or flextime? These are just a few of the elements that could
contribute to your team members' satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
The
office itself is something that has the potential to destroy motivation and
positivity. So, take steps to create a
healthy workplace for your team. Look at the work environment; it should be
comfortable, well-lit, clean, and safe. Other elements, such as life balance,
employee recognition, and involvement, also play a big part in your team
members' happiness (or lack thereof).
Praise
your people for the good work that they do, and ensure that everyone has a
healthy balance of work and time off.
Managing Positively
Once
you've removed obstacles that could slow your team's progress, it's time to
start managing your team in a positive way. There are many ways to do this.
- Teams that fully understand the purpose of what they do are usually more
engaged than teams without this focus. This is why it's important to create mission
and vision statements for your people. These statements are inspiring
messages that express the deeper purpose of the work that you are doing.
- Create a team charter
to define each person's role, the group's projected outcome, and your own
expectations. Team charters are useful for a happy team, because they provide
focus and direction. After all, when your team members know what they're doing
(and why), they can all move forward together, instead of pulling in different
directions.
- Next, look at the objectives that you've set for your team. Make sure that
your team members' goals align with those of the organization by using Management by
Objectives. Without this framework in place, your team members might feel
unmotivated, simply because they're not sure what they should be doing, or
because they don't understand how their role benefits the organization.
- Keep in mind that you play an enormous part in how your people feel
day-to-day, as well as in their long-term success. Look at how you're
communicating with them, and how you're helping them develop on an individual
level.
- Keep your team informed about what's happening in the organization, as well
as within the team; the more open and transparent you are, the easier it will be
to build
trust and create good relationships. Schedule regular meetings to discuss
important updates or changes. This also gives your team members a chance to
voice any concerns or issues that they're having with their work.
- Research shows that
autonomy plays a significant role in how satisfied people are in their jobs, so
do what you can to give more power to everyone on your team. This might mean
delegating important tasks, or simply stepping back and letting people choose
how they're going to complete a project. An added benefit of encouraging
autonomy is that people's work often improves when they have the power to choose
when and how they complete it.
- Your team members can't be positive and focused if they don't have the
resources they need to do their jobs. So, are you supporting
your people as effectively as you could be? The only way to know for sure is
to ask them.
- Find out what their biggest frustrations are at work, and discuss how you
could eliminate these. Are the processes and procedures that they use working
well? Do they have any trouble finding key information? By practicing Management by
Walking Around on a regular basis, you can connect and communicate well with
your team, and, by doing this, you can understand what's really going on.
Reinforcing
Positivity
Positivity is a habit, and the only way that you'll
cultivate long-term positivity within your team is to reinforce it daily. This
takes focus and self-discipline, but the benefits can be huge!
- First, make an effort to build
confidence in your team. Giving autonomy helps you get started with this,
but you can also build confidence by celebrating the successes that your team
members achieve. Another way to help your team is to encourage training and
development opportunities, so that your people can build additional skills and
knowledge.
- As you've likely experienced in the past, one person's bad attitude can
affect the entire group. If you have a team member who consistently thinks
negatively, then you need to take action before he or she drags the group
down.
The Betari Box
is a useful tool for explaining how someone's attitude and behavior can affect
the people around them. Meet with your negative team member one-on-one, and use
this tool to explain how his or her attitude is affecting the group. Approach
the situation with sensitivity and respect; this person might be experiencing
problems at home, or may have deeper issues that might be contributing to his or
her negative attitude.
Next, try to understand the problem. Is this
person unhappy in his or her role? And what could you do to help him or her turn
things around?
- Also, coach your people to use affirmations
to be more positive. Affirmations are positive statements that help you overcome
negative thinking. They're great for helping your team members overcome self-sabotaging
thoughts and behaviors.
Key Points
While there
are countless benefits of building a positive team, one of the most significant
is that people are most creative and productive when they're part of a happy,
healthy group.
Positive teams are led by positive leaders, so start with
yourself. Next, remove the obstacles that could have a negative influence on
your team's positivity.
Manage positively by creating a mission and
vision statement so that your team members know why they're there. Then,
reinforce long-term positivity by building self-confidence and using
affirmations. |
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