Do you inspire initiative on your team?
It is very tempting as a leader to say, “I wish my team would take greater initiative.”
But what if you are sending signals that shut down your team’s sense of initiative?
Use these three tips to help motivate your team and inspire initiative: Share on XHere are three tips to inspire greater initiative on your team:
1. Avoid dismissing their ideas.
To ask people for their ideas and then not pay attention or implement them is just going to cause people to not want to bring them up anymore. If a leader criticizes too much, the person is going to give up trying.
If you, as a leader, have someone come up to you and bring you an idea, rather than dismissing it outright, why not give it some consideration? Listen, learn more, and ask some questions. If you are too busy to consider the idea at that moment, then tell the person that you would like them to bring that up to you at another time.
Again, by not dismissing the ideas, you will get your employees to bring more forward.
2. Put their ideas into action.
If your team is going to bring ideas to you, put them into action so that everyone can begin to see results. If ideas are left with you, and you never put them into action, that now becomes a de-motivator to the team.
Even if you are not absolutely sure that the idea is going to work 100%, as long as it has a reasonable chance of success, why not at least experiment with it? Give it a try, and see how it works.
3. Let them shine.
If somebody on your team brings an idea forward and it is successful, it is important to give the team member all the glory. Nothing irks people more than when their boss takes credit for their great work. As the leader, you want to let them shine.
By doing these three things, you will inspire greater initiative on your team.
As with most things as a leader, what you do affects how your team acts. When you are not happy with how they are acting or behaving, you must look in the mirror first. When you do look in that mirror, you might decide that you need some additional training and development to become the best leader you can be.
This additional training can be done by having us in to do on-site training or through our virtual training studio delivered right to your desktop. Or, perhaps you just need to access some of our on-demand tools and resources that we have on our website.
