To get your team aligned and engaged starts with helping them see the bigger picture All-hands, department huddles and 1:1s can be helpful but the frequency isn’t enough, and the information is often way too much to retain. If you want your team to have the epiphany, take a subtle and fragmented approach over time. The key is to keep it ongoing.
1. Guest Speakers
Invite guest speakers to come and share what they do and why they do it. Give the team exposure and an opportunity to hear the decisions and thought process of others. A good follow up tactic is to ask the team who they would like to hear from or what dept or area they’d like to learn more about. It may even be an external customer or vendor.
2. Internal Field Trips
There’s a reason elementary schools take field trips. Simply reading about an animal, science or historical events gives context but experiencing it in real life cements the understanding. Also, these moments offer a valuable gift that reading does not. The ability to ask questions. Taking a “field trip” to another department to see how they work, why they do things the way they do and asking questions can often bring about those “aha” moments. A strong recommendation is to at least take field trips to departments that are customers and then also to a department where your team is the customer. Both can be extremely enlightening when the team understands “the why”.
3. Commercials and Prevues
Ok, this is basically sharing information! It seems rudimentary, but truly it’s honestly the most unused tactic by leaders. Lack of information is a huge reason why most teams have problems. The key is to simply share an excerpt or soundbite. Again, the intent is to not overwhelm with too much information but just enough to give them highlights and the gist. I recommend taking the twitter character limit approach. You can share anything including a new program or project launching in the company, changes that are coming, what the competition is launching, etc. Mediums can be short email (or just an email with the info in the subject line, text message, paper memos or neon postcards. You’ll find that colleagues may approach you to know more or you can say “more to come in our next….” huddle or all-hands. Never hurts to incorporate some fun and relevant work facts here and there.
4. Connect the dots
Gamification has become a great tool to help develop teams and make disseminating information interactive. Great leaders help the team connect the dots. There are numerous gamification apps, polls and programs that are simple, web-based and some of them are free. I frequently use polling or audience response systems during my workshops to bring engagement and interactive learning benefits.
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