Team engagement is a critical component, sometimes not considered. As a CEO, president, executive or board member, much of your attention goes to making your stakeholders happy, by ensuring you have a strong bottom line. Usually that means making decisions about pricing and strategizing ways to improve sales. Worthy endeavors for sure, but they might not actually be the best and most efficient place to start.
What typically gets completely missed in the strategy to profitability is a thorough examination of your team, their communication skills and the level of engagement from each team member. This is highly unfortunate. Solving your people problems is exactly how you can become more profitable without making a single sale.
The cost of poor communication and disengagement is staggering. So much so, we wrote a full article on the hard costs. Click here to read it now.
In a Harvard study of 83 executives, the majority of which had 10+ years of experience, the participants were asked “to put a price on the amount their companies lost each day due to a range of people issues, from interpersonal conflicts and unproductive weekly staff meetings to hiring the wrong employees and investing in training programs that don’t work.”
Even the team conducting the study was surprised by the results. There was a loss of more than $52 million per year, per organization due to people problems!
Communication and Internal Dynamics key areas to consider
Unlike most training that has little effect on your company’s bottom-line, improving the communication of your team members and the internal dynamics of your team is a well placed investment, rather than an expense. As long as you invest in the right kind, because all training is definitely not created equal.
So, how do you know what to look for when you have so many options to choose from?
Important factors to consider for training when you want to create lasting change.
- The training goes beyond surface level teaching.
- Understanding words does not change people, experience changes people.
- Follow up to reinforce the new learning.
In order to make lasting change, when it comes to communication and team dynamics, you have to take people from being unconscious of their internal processes, to being conscious of them. That goes beyond the delivery of a theory or strategy. It means helping them understand how they think, how that’s different from the way other people think, and then you need to give them the tools they need to bridge the gap in between to get a better result. When they get a full understanding of what’s going on beneath the surface, they give themselves more options for improved outcomes.
Experiential Learning takes concepts to the real world.
Of course, there’s nothing like real life experience to reinforce a lesson. While standard training courses deliver concepts, experiential learning takes those concepts into the real world. That takes people out of their heads and gets them to interact instead. It’s the interactions that create new connections for the brain and for your team. You just have to make sure you have an experienced instructor. One who’s fully capable of reining in the emotional reactions. One who can facilitate challenging team exercises; and turn them into an effective learning strategy that improves the situation, rather than degrades it.
Add the support and reinforcement
Finally, the only way to ensure the changes you’ve put in place for your team are going to go the distance is to follow up and encourage the commitment to building a new habit. When we learn something new it takes a bit of time to go from being incompetent at the new skill, to competent. In order to get there, your team will need support and reinforcement.
Our training is specifically built to create lasting change for the teams we work with, so you can be sure your investment into your team will be money well spent.
We even give you a scorecard, so you can accurately track the improvements! Click here to find out how we can help your team excel to the NexLevel.
