Leaders Who Lead

Kate Russell

• Publisher: Adelaide Conflict Management Pty Ltd
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781644678565
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Are you getting the most out of your team?
Do you find managing people stressful?
Does your team achieve the results you expect of them?

As leaders, we need our teams to perform well to ensure success - whether that's meeting budget, achieving goals or making money.

If we are stressed out, we can start to focus on all of the things that go wrong. We notice when people make mistakes and when they let us down. We might inadvertently create a culture of dobbing and gossip.

Drawing from her extensive experience as a mediator and conflict expert, Kate Russell has developed a model which identifies how to create a harmonious and thriving workplace.

In Leaders Who Lead, you will discover that to get the most out of our teams we need to focus on our team's strengths and all the good work that they do. People need to be appreciated, trusted and respected and it's the leader's responsibility to set this standard.

This book is for leaders who love their teams.

Chapter 4

Discover

discover​
/dɪˈskʌvə/​
verb​
To become aware of (a fact or a situation)[6]

Recently I worked with a team that was going through a huge amount of change.

Within less than twelve months this organisation had had a new CEO appointed, their head office moved from Canberra to Melbourne, they had a number of staff made redundant and they had hired a lot of new staff for the Melbourne office… oh, and they had to put on a major conference!

The CEO wanted help to bring the staff from both Melbourne and Canberra offices together; to build relationships and find a way to ensure that they had a sense of team, even if they were situated over two sites.

The first step was to discover how everyone was tracking. I did this through the use of an anonymous survey. I also met with some key people to get their take on the issues at hand.

We then held a two-day workshop in a neutral venue in Melbourne. I used the results from the anonymous survey to help me determine the agenda for the workshop.

We spent Day 1 getting to know each other. Lots of fun, discovering everyone’s values and needs and how we all respond to stress. On day two we got clarity. Clarity of their shared vision and goals. Clarity about people’s roles and responsibilities. And I gave the Canberra team and the Melbourne team an opportunity to tell each other anything that they believed they needed them to know.

The Canberra team expressed how they had been through a really difficult year; that the changes to the organisation had been painful and that they missed their colleagues who had been made redundant. They said that the Melbourne people didn’t need to reinvent the wheel as there are already a lot of processes and practices in place; that they were open to new ways of doing things and that they had most of the corporate knowledge - so just ask if you want to know something. Finally, they said that they wanted to make this work and they wanted to work together.

The Melbourne team said that they valued the experience and skills of the Canberra team. That they knew that they were lacking a lot of corporate knowledge and they wanted to find a way to access that information without being annoying. They wanted to work together and would do whatever it took to make this work.

This conversation around getting clarity also increased the level of respect and trust between the Canberra and Melbourne camps. The Canberra team were able to safely express the grief they felt about the changes and the Melbourne team were able to show their respect for the Canberra team but at the same time raise potential issues. The teams achieved great clarity about their history, their feelings, their current roles and responsibilities and how they were going to work together going forward.

We live in an age of mindfulness. We talk about emotional intelligence. We are becoming more self-aware and this is a good thing. With greater awareness and mindfulness we have no option but to take greater responsibility for our actions and reactions to any given situation.

If we act inappropriately when we are stressed, we shouldn’t be surprised when our team also starts to act out when they are stressed.

The best thing about self-awareness is that we can change the way we react to certain situations. We can get out of our own way when we recognise that we are stressed and that we are about to make a situation worse. We can also start to recognise how our behaviour might influence the way the team responds to any or all situations.

Leaders cast big shadows. What shadow do you cast?​
_________________​
[6] Oxford English Dictionary

DISCOVER

Clarity

clarity​
/ˈklarɪti/​
noun​
The quality of being certain or definite.[7]

​
Life gets so much easier and less stressful with clarity. It is always easier to make a decision based upon fact.

However what often happens is that if we don’t know something we tend to make assumptions to fill in any gaps in our knowledge. That is always fraught with danger. Our assumptions are often wrong. We often make poor decisions based on assumptions and then have to spend valuable time and energy backpedalling and apologising.

There are many areas where you might want to get greater clarity.

• What is your vision? Is this vision shared with your team? Are you and your team all working for the same thing? ...

Table of contents

• Copyright
• Kate Russell
• Things to Keep in Mind When Reading this book
• Love
• Team
• Introduction
• The Suitcase of Pain
• Loving Your Team
• Teams That Thrive
• Discover
• Communicate
• Trust
• Engagement
• Connection
• Assertiveness
• Leaders Who Lead
• Post Script
• Acknowledgements