Ep 89: How do you unlock your team’s potential for growth with Julian Roberts

Problem: How do you unlock your team’s potential for growth?

Productivity and growth stagnation in your team are some of the biggest threats to small and large businesses and can have serious implications for employee wellbeing. These things affect their judgment in making decisions aligned with the company’s goals and their confidence in handling challenges. Thriving in a changing business environment demands synergy between the top management and every individual on the team. How do you unlock your team’s potential for growth?

“It’s good to have things that stretch you. It puts you in an uncomfortable position.  I strongly believe when you become uncomfortable, and we don’t like being uncomfortable too long, you become more resourceful.  You become more cognitive of  strengths, also your weaknesses, and opportunities can come out of that.”

Promoting Consistent Growth Through Meaningful Dialogue

In this episode, Julian shares a few key lessons he’s learned from working with senior executives and leaders. The following tips will help identify emerging leaders in organizations. The opportunity to contribute more to the work of colleagues and team members.  

For leaders and teams, he recommends four steps. This can be done by:

• Setting the right mindset will ensure the team’s buy-in to grow.
• Creating a conducive environment for them to succeed. 
• Maintaining these environments consistently across the organization.
• Giving feedback and asking meaningful questions.

Step #1: Setting the Right Mindset to Secure Buy-in on Goals for Growth

To create growth, it’s important to create an environment of openness and transparency.  The team wants to see authenticity in these plans. You need to show them you’re walking the talk. You can galvanize your team by role modeling. 

• Consider how far you are from where you want to be
• Keep your team on the same page and assess why you do what you do
• Clearly state where you’re going next
• Let them know what kind of growth you expect, and that growth comes with pain

“I always say to leaders, ‘Take the opportunity to really reflect what you’ve done that day. On what you’ve done in context with an individual when you engage with you on some days. There’s always something that you can learn. There’s something that you can do differently.  And so take time out to reflect. And as you start to look at individuals, not in what they can do for you, but actually, ‘What can I do for them to unlock that potential?’ It suddenly changes the perspective. It changes the dynamics.”

Step #2: Create the Right Environment for them to Succeed

Support your team’s development. To reach the mountain of success, it’s important to know what the roadblocks are. Afterward, make sure your role as a leader is to help eliminate those roadblocks, so your team can succeed. 

This is not something you can do all by yourself, in fact, the opposite is true. Establish an empowering culture. Your team should be able to take risks and be willing to take risks with them. Let them make their own decisions and come up with their own ideas. Be prepared to accept that mistakes will be made from time to time. In order to create this environment, remember to:

• Establish clear boundaries for everyone’s role on the team
• Decide when you want to achieve the projected growth
• Provide resources and budgets for their initiatives and projects

“Empowering is not just throwing something and then wandering off. It’s actually providing the support they need, whether that’s you, or other people. The resources, the training, which is critical as well. I always say this to people. Because when you empower people, they may make mistakes. Because they’re learning new things, make sure you’re kind when they fail. But use that failure as an opportunity to learn, not to chastise. Not to beat people and not to be horrible, but say, ‘look, what can we learn from this situation?”

Step # 3: Maintain These Environments Across the Organization

For organizations, consistency in behavior and message can be a challenge.  Employees need to be excited about their workplace. Make sure you give feedback based on the plan you set early on. As a leader, you set the tone for the performance of the team, and you need to lead by example.

“Modeling goes more than beyond a simple mimicry and imitation. It goes deep beyond our thoughts, our values, our behaviors, and our emotional reactions. People start to model and start to feel the same as well. And so, there’s a psychology behind all this in terms of modeling. People seeing and observing other people’s behavior and reflecting that as well.”

Step #4: Give Feedback Regularly and Ask Questions

To make sure you succeed, make sure to do regular reviews with your team. By doing this, you’re able to identify any other roadblocks and what support they need. This step is crucial because this is an opportunity to ask questions that will identify areas of success and room for improvement. 

Here are some questions you can ask:

• What are your current objectives?
• How do you intend to achieve these objectives?
• Where are you now in terms of achieving these objectives?
• What are the things that you can control in your projects
• What are your barriers to achieving those objectives, and how can I help you?

Encourage discussions and even healthy arguments. Don’t be afraid to test out the ideas you’ve set.

“Consistently cast that vision. Talk about it. Explain what it means to you. What it means in the context of their job. Really, interact with people. But also get people to question it, to be inquisitive of it as well.”

Resources About Leadership:

• Download Complimentary Leadership Workbook, by Julian Roberts

On changing mindsets: “Yes, you made that step forward towards a goal. You’ve got to believe you can do it. And often I get to people where they are very ambitious, they’ve already been successful, but they get these big goals. Then there’s a lack of belief, and that could be a historical thing. It could be what somebody said to them. Then, I helped them reframe that. And we then smashed that limiting belief  because we believe we are only touching a certain percentage of what we can believe.”