We’re experiencing significant social change. Here’s how you can increase output and productivity amongst your team during this period.
- Recognise and understand your strengths and weaknesses
- Build collaborative teams who communicate
- Create a safe and trusting working environment
- Embrace diverse thinking and skills
1. Recognise and understand your strengths and weaknesses?
“If you push me towards something you think is a weakness, then I’ll turn that weakness into a strength.” – Michael Jordan
Some things in life will inevitably change; nothing remains the same, and when the time arrives when the status quo is interrupted, you need to react accordingly to maintain performance.
In some circumstances, change is deemed detrimental to success and therefore categorised as a weakness. While there are instances when change hinders the progression of a team, it’s critical to pivot and embrace new philosophies and methods to maintain, and surpass, your aspirations.
NBA Hall of Famer Michael Jordan echoed this sentiment, rejecting avenues of weakness and channelling his efforts into forging a career based on foundations of success. This elite mentality saw him end an illustrious career littered with honours and achievements, including 6x NBA champions and 5x NBA MVP Awards.
Jordan shunned the path of limitation and based his career on the principles of the path of possibility; this mindset exemplifies how teams need to embrace change to increase their resourcefulness, even when faced with unfamiliar situations.
That said, before we can even attempt to embrace change, it’s critical to understand your colleagues’ and your own strengths and weaknesses.
Why is it important to recognise your strengths and weaknesses?
While it’s human nature to hone in on our strengths, you must also identify your weaknesses.
Anyway – for some, they describe these thoughts pushed forward as their “wake-up call”.
Identifying your strengths and weaknesses (and letting your peers know what they are) not only supports your personal development but also helps your colleagues understand your traits in more detail.
This helps you and your team complete short and long-term goals.
How Co-Creation can help you understand and accept your traits.
While the importance of identifying your strengths and weaknesses can’t be underestimated, this represents half of the task at hand.
Here at Co-Creation, we enable people to:
- Develop a deeper understanding of their strengths, and
- Accept their weaknesses and see them in a kinder light.
Doing so will help you become more comfortable offering and asking for help, and more importantly, increase your teams’ resourcefulness.
2. Build collaborative teams who communicate
In their top skills for 2022, leading recruitment company, Michael Page earmarked communication as a key trait an employer looks for in a prospective hire. This characteristic plays a quintessential part in supporting companies to increase resourcefulness in times of change.
An effective communication plan can play a significant role in helping us avoid anxiety and fear triggered by the change that could serve as a preventative of performing to our optimum potential.
Our change model has been devised to foster collective working, and encourage team members to communicate their skillsets with others, in turn, combining these characteristics so they can play to each other’s strengths and help each other with gaps and weaknesses; rather than operating in silos.
How does a silo work?
When companies work in silos, this means they structure their teams in bubbles; employees could work on their own, or within an internal team or department.
While it could be argued silos can help employees focus on their specialist areas, they also come with their disadvantages, such as:
When something gives you a sense of meaning, it is both mentally engaging and stimulating to you and gives you a feeling of one-ness and connection.
- They can damage workplace cohesion.
- Employees can become disengaged.
- Team relationships can become fraught.
- Trust in key stakeholders can be compromised.
3. Create a safe and trusting work environment
With this in mind, act as a source of support and listen to the thoughts and opinions of your team. This will serve as an opportunity for your peers to be transparent and prompt them to find solutions to problems on their own.
Encouraging responsibility can enhance autonomy, build their ability to lead, and improve the overall quality of your team.
Conversely, however, some may not be as accustomed to working collaboratively and could need support in dropping their guard, before they can share their ideas.
We help teams foster psychological safety. In turn, this encourages team members to embrace the differences of their colleagues and see conflict as a way of building something better than building walls and silos. Enabling teams to build trust, openness, debate, be comfortable with healthy conflict, and hold each other accountable so the team is delivering in line with its shared purpose.
4. Embrace diverse thinking and skills
“Expertise is not a single skill; it is a collection of skills, and the professional may be highly expert in one of the tasks in her domain while remaining a novice in others.” – Daniel Kahneman
Teams can’t function if they rely on one core skill; you need a blend of different attributes; some team members may be great communicators, some may excel creatively, while others will be inspiring leaders.
Diversity is the bedrock of any team worth its salt, and when times change, such skills are combined to navigate challenges and maintain performance.
A diverse team helps a team to have a greater breadth of resources, skills, knowledge, and strengths to draw upon as changes arise.
Here at Co-Creation, we harness these skills and enable teams to build trust, openness, debate, be comfortable with healthy conflict, and hold each other accountable so the team is delivering in line with the purpose.
Find out more about FHOCAL™, our change management model, by emailing info@co-creation.group or call +44 7876 024555 and find out how we can help you increase your company’s resourcefulness in the face of ongoing change.