Employees spend 80% of their week with people they don’t choose to.
If they’re not the boss, they’ve formed friendships and working relationships with people who have been selected for them.
Therefore, how your people feel about their colleagues (and bosses) directly affect how they perform at work.
If your colleagues energise, support, teach, inspire the team or simply make people laugh – chances are your team are going to feel physically and mentally different. They’ll be inspired, motivated and energised to deliver a top result. You’ll see it in their faces and through interactions with their colleagues.
Many of the talent who come to me talk about how they don’t feel valued at work. That their bosses actions don’t match their words. That their boss, they feel, doesn’t actually see their perspective or even value it.
Having the courage to speak up out the things that matter to you is the only way to create change. I counsel all talent who come to me in tears or highly frustrated to only consider other options if they are 100% confident they have voiced their concerns and change has not been made. Sometimes simply asking the question can improve things.
Challenging conversations at work are exactly that. Hard to have, hard to hear. But, after getting over the shock of it – you can both get on with improving things.
If change can’t be made, I then ask job seekers: if the people who feature in 80% of your life don’t deliver any of the above, should they really have a starring role 80% of the time?
Unconscious biases towards others are often revealed in the trickiest of circumstances. Only by being honest with ourselves as leaders and encouraging honesty with our staff can we expect to inspire change in our organisation. As a leader, we need to ask ourselves: do we respect, value, teach and have fun with our team? And if not – why not?
