When I first started leading people I thought the best strategy for getting our team to perform at a high level was to turn everyone into me. Â Inspired by the genius of Dr Evil, I wanted to create a bunch of mini-mes in my office. Â The result? Â Total failure. It turns out either I am not as cool as I thought or that people aren’t me. (Both are true.) After a few months of failure doing it my way, I learned that I really needed to celebrate the unique differences that my team brought to the table.
I hear this type of scenario from leaders that I work with all the time as the try and assert their way of doing things on their team only to get frustrated when it doesn’t work out. Â Most of the team the leader blames their team by stating that their team is either incompentent or worse just plain dumb.
When I started celebrating my team’s differences, I started get the most out of their personal potential. Â Besides, who wants to manage a bunch of Brandon’s. Â Sounds exhausting.
This week’s New Work Revolution podcast is about celebrating your team’s differences at work to bring out the best in them.