How to create inspired and effective teams.

Leaders have pondered over the idea of increasing employee effectiveness and productivity for decades. Typically, managers would analyze various organizational processes to identify deficiencies, and then implement sweeping changes in an attempt to transform a department or business unit and increase output. Although this may be a common systematic approach to increasing employee effectiveness, this method is inherently flawed.

Purpose of leadership

For this article, I define leadership as the creation of other autonomous leaders with sufficient authority to influence processes. Notice that the responsibility of leaders is to manufacture other leaders in their respective positions who will then formulate plans that will increase efficiency.

The responsibility of a leader is not to manage the processes, but to effectively manage the people who control the processes. This simple shift in how leaders approach their purpose will determine the level of output they receive from their employees.

The true purpose of a leader is to effectively manage his people resources. So, the primary focus of a leader would then transition from improving processes to improving the conditions for growth and innovation in the department or organization. Why? Let's examine the growth process of a plant in nature.

If a plant receives the appropriate amount of water and sunlight, it will grow well on its own without the need for intervention. As a leader, your time and effort should go into creating conditions that are ripe for growth and innovation that will allow your employees to innovate organically as part of your normal business process.

Create the right conditions

Your employees already are encoded with the ability to yield innovative ideas, but they cannot grow or innovate under the wrong conditions. That's why it becomes extremely important that you create a specific and intentional climate in your organization that inspires your employees to be effective.

Creating the right conditions for effectiveness and innovation begins with your mindset. Everything in an organization is shaped by how a leader thinks. The successes or failures of an organization could undoubtedly be traced back to specific conditions created knowingly or unknowingly by a leader or leadership team. So, if a leader would like effectiveness or innovation to be important to her employees, then those ideas must first be important to that leader.

Interestingly, many leaders would argue that effectiveness and innovation are extremely important in the organization. However, verbally in meetings and in written organization communications, other business objectives that also may be important are stressed instead.

For example, the customer service mishaps of some larger corporations are often documented. If you were to interview the leaders of those organizations, they would probably insist that the organization is committed to exceeding customer expectations. The problem is that "exceeding customer expectations" must become more than an intercompany slogan; it must be integrated into the very fabric of the organization's daily operations in a visible manner.

As a leader, you must set the agenda for the primary focus areas of your organization. If the determination is made that effectiveness and innovation are important, then you must overtly illustrate this idea. It should be reinforced at all meetings, in all communications, and during employee review sessions, among other areas.

Encourage autonomy

In addition to the leadership mindset, it is important that you allow for autonomy in the growth process of your employees. Structured autonomy is important because it allows employees to use their skills to creatively solve or enhance business processes.

You can create autonomous employees by providing a structured framework or guidelines within which they operate and by encouraging innovation within those given boundaries. To create autonomous employees, follow these simple steps using a project example.

  • Thoroughly explain what the project is and why they were chosen for the task.
  • Explain why this particular project is important. When employees understand the "why" factor it eliminates the need for detailed guidance on the project.
  • Explain how this project relates to the vision and mission.
  • Clearly identify project benchmarks and when relevant stakeholders should be notified of the project status.
  • Determine a specific due date for the project.

Notice there is no mention of instructions on how to do the project. That action will destroy innovation in your organization because the employee will be more focused on meeting your detailed requirements than achieving creative problem-solving or innovative ideas.

As a leader, it is not your responsibility to tell your employees how to complete a task. Rather, you must create a framework or proper growing conditions so that they can complete the tasks effectively.

Determine personality types

Another important factor in creating an environment that will spur innovation is for leaders to understand the general personality types of their employees. This is a critical and often overlooked aspect of effective management.

For example, in building on the plant example from earlier, imagine removing a perfectly healthy tropical plant from a Caribbean island and transporting it to North America. Even if the conditions are suitable for plant growth in general, the tropical plant would not be able to thrive in those conditions because they're not suitable for that specific type of plant.

Given this example, consider these two points: Are your employees in the optimal job positions to thrive based on personality type? Also, do you find that certain employees seem to have conflict with others regularly?

It may not be that the employee can't work effectively with others. It simply could be a matter of differing personality types. To analyze the personality types of your employees, have your employees take a personality assessment (some are free). Based on the data, determine if certain employees would work better with certain co-workers or flourish in a different capacity.

Like the plant, it's not an issue of the employee being bad. The major concern is that the conditions be suitable for that specific person. It would be a major setback to lose a perfectly good employee over incorrect growing conditions.

Innovation in remote teams

Creating effective teams can be challenging enough when you are centrally located. The process can be slightly more challenging when managing virtual or remote teams. To minimize those challenges implement the following steps.

Instead of viewing them as virtual employees, treat them as regular employees who just happen to work in a remote location. There is a subtle difference is this psychology. When an employee is seen as a virtual worker he often is left out of meetings and important communications such as memos or emails, and is generally viewed as a separate entity such as an outside contractor.

That form of mental separation damages team cohesion and may result in remote team members feeling like they are not part of the larger group. Special attention should be given to this fact and leaders always should strive to involve these employees in every aspect of the organization.

To aid in promoting communication, leaders should adopt an internal communication or sharing platform. This platform would operate similar to a social media system where employees could share project updates, discuss ideas, and upload documents.

The value of having such a platform is that many employees already are familiar with the social concept, so the learning curve would be relatively short. Also, it gives remote employees a chance to frequently communicate with all employees just as if they were at your location.

In years past, these types of systems may have been cost prohibitive or required extensive assistance from your IT department to implement. Now, there are several free and low-cost versions that operate as a private internal communication tool for organizations. Choose the tool that best meets the needs of your organization.

In addition, allow your remote employees to communicate directly with you or other employees through the use of free video conferencing tools. The cost to set up such a system is minimal and it is a great way to include remote employees in weekly or monthly meetings.

Another factor to consider is that remote employees don't have the opportunity to experience the department rewards that everyone else receives such as office parties, birthdays, team building events, award ceremonies, and picnics. To address this, leaders should create an award and recognition system specifically for remote teams. This system should be equivalent to what employees at the headquarters receive and would serve as a method to show appreciation for their efforts.

Whether you are leading a traditional or virtual team, it is extremely important that you are intentionally creating the necessary conditions to inspire cohesion, innovation, and effectiveness in your organization. Leaders should begin this process by consistently reinforcing the primary business focus, giving employees autonomy to creatively respond to business challenges, and assessing personality types for optimal job placement.

When conditions that are suitable for growth are established, leaders will spend much less time on employee maintenance issues and instead can focus more on business growth concepts.