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Team Potential
This past month I have been thinking alot about potential.

You may be familiar with the old adage “you have more potential than you’ll ever realise”  or you may have thought to yourself “how can I harness my potential more fully?”

If you are a team manager, you may see enormous potential in your team and be experimenting with ways to tap into this more intentionally. Shared Leadership creates conditions for potential to flourish.

Warmly,

Shared leadership = tapping into the potential of your team

In this uncertain world we now live and work in, new ways of working together and sharing leadership and authority is critical for success. Traditional hierarchies are slow to respond, centralising the locus of control and decision making. Placing too heavy a burden on “the leader” and too little expectation on staff in the team.

Everybody can demonstrate leadership, not just a few people at the top of organisations. My driving purpose as a coach is to support “formal leaders” and teams discover and foster leadership in unexpected places. Distributing leadership and enabling it to flourish across organisations so we can be more responsive to the challenges we face.

Leadership moments exists for us every day. Namely, seizing opportunities when others shy away, speaking truth to power, asking provocative questions, or demonstrating thoughtfulness or  kindness under pressure. Shared leadership draws on the potential of your team. Encouraging more initiative, more creativity, improved decision making, and generating good team vibes. Shared leadership hinges on good communication; emphasising good process and equal participation.

Here’s a place for you to start if you want to foster shared leadership in your team. Each team member takes on the responsibility to create and maintain certain conditions, such as:

  • ensuring everyone has a chance to speak at a team meetings
  • encouraging deep and active listening when things get heated
  • acting out a “yes we can” approach – building on each other’s ideas to action a brave endeavour
  • defining accountability and decision-making through shared responsibility
  • building in reflection points and check ins as the norm, not the exception
  • tapping into available intel – drawing on head, heart and gut intelligence to VUCA problems

I’m a big believer in being faithful in the little things by building a foundation of good collaborative practice – and then shared leadership will flourish from here.

What practices are happening in your organisation?
I’d love to hear what inspired action you are taking to unleash potential in your team.
Image via Neslihan Sezer @SezerNes