It's growing season, spring is in the air, and we are looking forward to everything in nature bursting into life. The spring air is full of anticipation and untapped capability. Thinking about business, does the same apply to your firm, your teams and you?
Are your teams ready to be nurtured and grow to achieve their full potential or are they stuck in the mud with no opportunity to flourish. It’s worth pondering as there are a lot of links between growing your people and gardening:
People, like plants react well to being in the right environment with all of the right nutrients they need. Pausing and thinking about the growing conditions for the year ahead is a great thing to do.
Sometimes the simple things done extraordinarily well can be the difference between a bumper year and a failed crop. Let’s look at two key areas of your environment and your people:
Your environment. Three key things to consider:
1. Do your teams have room to fail? That is, can they make small mistakes, learn and develop from them. It’s amazing that as children we learn quickly from our mistakes and as adults, we so often encourage to get everything “right first time”. Just a little space for creativity, and space to make small mistakes can help people really grow their confidence and ability. This is especially true when they are supported to learn from their mistakes.
2. Do your teams get all the feedback and support they need? Whenever we talk to teams about confidence one area that always gets mentioned is feedback, both positive and developmental feedback. As a rule, if the environment is right then people are really open to getting great quality feedback to help them develop and grow. Most people we speak to don’t get enough feedback in their day to day environment.
3. What opportunities to take ownership do your teams have? Is there a safe amount of delegation and support to allow them to tackle progressively more challenging opportunities and grow within their role? By promoting ownership and incrementally developing your team you are creating a higher performing environment where everyone is growing their own abilities.
Your People. Three things to consider:
1. Are your people ready to grow? Are you close enough to them, their capabilities and development areas to know when they are ready for their stage of growth. A lot of leaders and managers we speak to are a little removed from their teams (workload, hybrid working and lack of coaching skills for managers and leaders) and struggle to identify those need more support and those ready for the next stage of development. 2. Is everyone around you open to giving and receiving feedback? Picking up point two from the environment piece above, while your team might be open to receiving feedback, are they giving useful and beneficial feedback to those around them? We call great feedback “evidential feedback”. This is feedback that focuses on what happened, removing the emotion, and gives the receiver of feedback the opportunity to reflect, learn, and grow.
3. Is everyone open, honest with the ability to reflect on their development areas and their core skills? With an increasing pace of work, do you and your team have enough reflective time to help you identify what you are doing well (and how you repeat it) and what isn’t going so well (and how you improve it)? There often feels like a pressure to do more, sometimes doing a little less, with deeper reflection allows you to achieve so much more.
Great gardeners don’t leave things to chance. They create the right environment. Tailor what they do for each individual part of their garden and change their approach to get the best outcomes possible. These are the simple things done well.
You can replicate all of these approaches with your team. Create the right place to work, a culture of learning, personal and professional development. Adjust and tailor your approach to teams and individuals and make them feel special.
Be ready to receive and give feedback adjusting your approach as you go. Great leaders tweak their approaches to each individual until the garden is really a thing of beauty admired by everyone who sees it.