“What I desire, I will strive to attain.”
Knowing what we want in life is essential to our drive and focus. On an intellectual level, we all acknowledge this as a truth and we applaud the focused go-getters we see on Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok. Our teams want to grow. They want to attain greatness and they sign up with the anticipation of greatness, of being promoted, recognized and appreciated. They imagine becoming industry heroes and they aspire to be treated like the people they observe through their social media-driven windows on the world.
The reality? In the majority of cases, businesses fall significantly short of this utopian dream.
Supporting limitless learning
Why? Freedom is a core human desire. And yet, giving people the freedom to make decisions is frightening to those who set up the systems and create the statutes that rule our businesses. This fear is based upon control, or perhaps the potential loss of control and concerns that the team members will outgrow the business. Maintaining a status quo is alluring and we therefore confine people to a golden cage – just enough freedom to stay, not enough to grow.
What if? Learning is limitless opportunities for the mind. When businesses understand that we can grow the minds of our teams with outstanding learning opportunities, then we are on the path to: ‘What if?’
Reining in interference
Recently we conducted a custom-made learning program for an organization in Dubai. In a lively session, we explored what the possibilities would be for team members in their work environment if they embraced one simple phrase. We worked on this phrase, approaching it from multiple angles. We let the team work on implementing this phrase for two weeks with no interference or follow up from management and we then invited the team to come back and talk to us about what had happened.
They shared wonderful stories of how life was a little better. We then ran a simple but interesting diagnostic with the teams and got them to visually identify where they wanted to see workplace growth. We then invited them to work on the element they had selected. They were then asked to come back in one month and share the results with us.
Appreciation and support
At the scheduled time, we met again with the groups and the results were nothing short of astonishing. There were countless stories of successes with customers, team members and management. Significantly, the teams were extremely vocal about how much they felt appreciated by their managers. And there were hard facts too; the average check had grown across the board by over 10 percent and there were stories of both brilliant sales and crazy tips, including one customer who tipped a waiter USD 3,000.
A life-growth experience
What actually happened here was that the team members conducted their own training, learning and growth with just a small amount of input from management. Importantly, management also then gave their full support to the teams during the execution. Even more importantly, no one thought of this exercise as training, but instead, viewed it as an incredible life-growth experience in which participants were able to identify what they wanted to achieve and then fulfill their goals. Isn’t that what we want, after all; self-managing teams growing our business while we reward, encourage and – put simply – are nice to them!
