EPISODE 3:  Thrive

Welcome to the Unstifled Podcast.

I'm your host, George Nijmeh.

And in this episode, Thrive, we're going to dive into the do's and don'ts and how to make sure everyone is set up for success and thriving when multiple teams come together.

All right, welcome everyone.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good night.

Thanks for tuning in wherever you are in the world.

So before I go any further, let's define thriving, right?

So everybody might have a different definition of thrive.

So here's mine.

It means to grow or succeed at a high level.

We don't want our employees just surviving the day, surviving the month, surviving the year, you know, just kind of waiting for their checks every week, waiting for their annual bonus, annual pay increase.

We want them actively advancing and improving.

All right.

So we want the teams to thrive and they're going to perform their best and feel fulfilled when they're progressing toward their goals.

And that's only going to happen if you assign goals and objectives and share those business objectives with your team.

So I put together what I'm calling the Unstifled Top Three Do's.

All right.

So there's thousands of ways to do this.

But the top three Unstifled Do's are get your people's goals aligned.

All right.

There's a lot, a lot of companies out there that are not sharing their business objectives with everyone at the company.

You know, they'll share it with maybe some of the VPs, possibly a director.

But none of the middle management seem to be aligned with the overall business objectives.

So number one, do get your people's goals aligned.

Number two, on the do list, make sure they have open communication with each other, not just with you.

And number three, clarify roles and responsibilities.

Make sure that employees know there's more than one person that can take action.

You know how many times I speak to an HR manager, and they tell me how they're gonna go and tell the CEO this and that, and oh my god, you're not gonna believe what I saw, and I saw this, and I'm gonna go and tell the CEO that these people weren't being safe.

And then I'll ask them almost immediately, have you spoken to the department supervisor yet?

Did you tell anyone else before you go and tell the main person?

And guess what their answer is?

It's a big fat no.

They didn't say anything.

It's like a walking camera for the CEO.

Like just a funny, we don't need robots, you know, if you got an environment like this.

They're just so excited to run back and share the bad news.

I just can't believe it sometimes when I'm talking to some people.

And guess whose fault that is?

The leader.

They've created an every man for themselves environment.

All right, so what are, before we dive in further with the do's, what are the Unstifled top three don'ts?

All right, so one, rewarding individual over team efforts.

Two, ignoring team conflicts.

Three, stop micromanaging.

Okay, and we'll talk about this later.

All right, so what are the do's?

Number one, aligning goals.

Get everybody on the same page.

This is the most simple thing you can possibly do as the leader.

Share the business objectives.

Share your KPIs, your metrics, or whatever other fancy way to say it.

Just share it with everyone at the same time, if it's possible.

So unless it's a company of one, the business objectives will be a team effort to hit them.

The next thing, number two, on the dues, open communication between the teams.

Stop encouraging gossip or complaining.

All right, so otherwise, that's all you're gonna hear the whole day, the whole week, the whole month, every day of every minute at work is just gonna be people complaining about how other people are not as good as them.

It's just gonna create everyone walking around taking notes on all the bad stuff.

They're not even gonna think about writing down any of the good stuff.

And this gets everyone nowhere super fast.

And you're probably wondering, well, I'm not encouraging gossiping or complaining.

Well, yeah, you're probably not directly encouraging it.

But if you're listening and you're not asking the right questions back, like, what are you doing to help?

Then you're encouraging it.

You know, I've been in companies where the department leaders and for sake of the storytelling, let's call this person Bob, that have multiple location oversight, just complain on how another location is doing something.

Right?

So let's say another, you know, at their main facility, they fill out a form in a certain way.

Then they go to the other facility that they have 100 percent oversight over.

They just go there and complain, and they take that complaint back to their mothership.

You know, they're just complaining.

And then take a wild guess who's in charge of the department they're complaining about.

Bob.

So, Bob actually is just complaining about himself.

And why, why, why is this happening?

It's a really, really, really easy answer to this.

Comes back to the leader.

The leader is giving them the stage.

Right?

So stop this behavior, just stop it immediately.

It's completely and utterly useless behavior.

Unless your goal is to have everyone hate each other at the company, or in your social life, or family, anywhere.

Right?

If you want everyone to hate each other, and slowly watch their demise, then yeah, then just keep doing it, because you're doing an amazing job.

Alright, so instead of giving them a stage to complain on, redirect them.

Right?

That's the big thing here.

Just redirect.

Ask them, okay, you know, I hear what you're saying.

How did you help fix the issue?

Is it still going on?

You know, did you train them on how you do it someplace else?

Did you leave with it still in bad shape?

Did you offer any coaching or support?

Was any support offered?

Right?

And then ask, you know, when is this expected to be resolved?

Like, when is this issue gonna completely go away?

And then extend your support if needed.

Again, always lead by example.

So, if you want your team to work independently, and I'm hoping every leader that's listening wants their team to work independently, they will need to work well with each other.

And last, I checked, complaining and gossiping about your employees doesn't lead to great collaboration.

Number three do from the fabulous Unstifled Top 3 is clarify their roles and responsibilities.

Make sure Bob understands his role at the company and what is expected.

When creating roles and responsibilities, you need to have the business objectives out on your desk in front of you and make sure that the responsibilities that you're documenting for everyone's roles and responsibilities are outlined, that are outlined, are aligned with the business objectives.

And please, please do me a favor.

Make sure not to include.

And this is where I'm going to need to take your pencils out now and write this down.

Do not include, feel free to bring concerns about others without taking any action to resolve the issue.

Just report back to me as if that's your primary responsibility.

All right, so again, that's a joke.

You can go ahead and just completely erase everything that you just wrote.

Let's, so now that we talked about some of the do's, let's review the Unstifled top three don'ts.

Rewarding individual over team efforts.

This is where your company culture can shine, right?

Don't encourage islands of knowledge.

I've been in a lot of places where the star employee, let's call it, in one department, just sitting by themselves alone, literally might as well be in a completely different building.

They've separated themselves from the rest of the team.

There's zero camaraderie whatsoever at the place.

And why, again, I like to ask why, because their leader has made it clear by their actions that working as a team is totally unnecessary at that place.

So what ends up happening is the team just, you know, fault-finding each other.

All they're doing, like we talked about earlier, they're just waiting for someone to do something stupid so they can complain about their coworkers all day, like Bob, instead of working together to hit their goals, right?

Which is why we all show up every day.

We want to hit the goals.

We want to make sure that we're earning and learning.

It's important to reward the team as a whole and celebrate the team wins so you can make sure that that precedent is set.

Number two, ignoring team conflicts.

Big don't over here.

This is where you can really gain some trust points with your employees.

When there's conflicts, any kind of conflict, step in and provide support to everyone, not just who you think is right.

Don't pick sides.

Explain, explain, explain, and make sure that everybody understands how the conflict started and how we're gonna help end the conflict.

If you only, you know, step in to support who you think is right, that's only gonna band-aid the conflict.

And trust me, it's gonna come back later, and it's gonna come back 100% worse than it was before.

Just make sure everyone on the team understands one another and why they have a differing opinion.

Get to the root cause immediately.

And before you close or celebrate the close or approve the decision, however you wanna end the conflict, just again, make sure that everybody understood how the final decision was made, and make sure that you get total and complete buy-in from everyone.

They, buy-in doesn't mean that they have to wholeheartedly agree with the final decision, but they at least understand the point of view on how the decision was made, and how they can work with this decision.

And last, but definitely not least, by any means, micromanaging.

Stop doing this.

Just stop.

Stop being copied on every email.

Stop going to every meeting.

Stop being upset if someone didn't tell you about something that they already took care of.

That's what employees are for, right?

In case you need to hear this, when you think you're being copied on all emails, you're not.

You're only being copied on what your employees want you to see.

Or like Bob, they just copy you on their complaining emails, which is just turning you into an ugly, green, blue monster jumping out of bed.

I never did understand the whole copy or bust thing.

Everyone secretly knows it's a bad habit, yet everybody still does it.

Again, why?

Because the leader never makes it clear that the team should work together on their, again, aligned goals, right?

So A, they're not making it clear, and B, they haven't taken the time to create aligned goals.

They might have goals, but they're definitely not aligned.

The leader made it clear that when they're copied on these emails, that they're gonna jump in and answer the question before anyone else can chime in.

And I've seen this countless times, right?

They're copied, they're clearly CC'd, right?

So if everyone knows how emails work, the to line is who the email is for, or who the question is for, and the CC is just you're copying somebody.

It should almost be mute participants.

But of course, because some people can't help themselves, the leaders who are creating a stifled environment are going to respond immediately.

And once you've trained everyone that works at the company, that whenever they see that you're CC'd, that you're going to answer the email right away, guess what they're going to do when they get the email?

Yeah.

Did you say not answer?

Yeah, they're not even going to respond.

They probably won't even look at the email, or they'll read the first sentence, look up, see that you're copied on it, and they're going to just file it away somewhere.

They're not going to answer, because they're going to be so afraid to have a differing opinion.

Horrible, horrible behavior.

You'll never hear their voices.

You'll never hear the thoughts of your employees like this.

It's just a total innovation killer.

Again, like how cool would it be if the only emails the boss was copied on were emails on all the team wins?

Victories, right?

Celebrations, good news, right?

You're going to sometimes have the occasional bad.

But I would hope if you truly want to call yourself a leader at a company, that more of your emails that you're copied on are, you know, celebrations of wins and not losses.

That's how you get your employees thriving and innovating.

You know, never, never, never forget that you were one at one point.

You were one of them at one point in your life.

You know, I was just having trouble figuring out the best way to say that.

I sometimes forget that I was there at one point in my career, you know, and you just have to take a step back, let them become themselves, let them find themselves.

Your job now is to create the next generation, right?

The next gen of leaders.

So do it, do it well and get out of their way.

I want to end this episode with a real simple message about positioning your employees to thrive.

And again, that's what this episode is about.

Just, you know, give them direction, resources, and support.

But you can't do the work for them.

Can't do the actual work for them.

They must learn from their own path.

And something that I like to tell people, when we start talking about how to get teams to work together, or how do you get your employees to thrive, is I compare it to superhero movies.

And I know that sounds funny, but just listen, you know, listen to me out here.

Right, so have you ever noticed in every superhero movie the hero doesn't discover their power until after they failed a bunch of times?

So, you know, they're, you know, cause you're watching a movie and you know from the cover, like, oh yeah, yeah, you can fly, you can fly, man, or you can do this, or you got, you could shoot bullets from your elbows.

But no matter how much someone in the movie tries to tell them what they're capable of, it only clicks when they keep pushing and trying and trying and trying and trying.

After they just keep trying and failing and trying and failing, boom, superpower is unlocked, right?

So it's usually happens about like 27 minutes in.

So if you figure the movie is about an hour and a half, so like 30 minutes in, you're talking about like 33%, right?

So that's when you're gonna unlock your employees' powers.

You have to let them go out on their own.

Provide the direction, the resources, the support, align the goals, share the business objectives with them, and then get out of the way.

Go.

Stop going.

Don't go to every meeting.

Don't try to answer every question, because you just can't.

It's impossible.

If you think you're doing a service to the business by answering every question, you're not.

You're doing the worst thing you could possibly do.

All your employees will eventually find different jobs, because they're just never gonna find themselves at work.

They're never gonna unlock their superpower.

Let them find their own power.

Stop holding them back.

Just be there to support them and remind them to keep going no matter what.

Just make sure you're creating an environment that's fun, growth-focused, motivating.

And I'm gonna get corny here and say it, Unstifled.

Because without that, no one's unlocking their superpower for you.

They're gonna wait till they get to that leader who's gonna allow them to truly embrace themselves and get that power out of them.

And I did say fun before I said growth-focused and motivating.

And I'm just sick and tired of hearing that work shouldn't be fun.

I'm not talking about taking them to Chuck E.

Cheese and buying them a bunch of tokens and letting them play Big Bertha when you throw the sandbags into their mouth and get tickets so you can go get a pack of gum.

I'm saying make sure that the people, your employees feel free to smile and make it okay to be open and express their thoughts freely.

There's a lot of places when I talk to the employees, I try to ignore the leaders, when I talk to the employees, that's the biggest concern is that when the leaders walk in, they feel that they're gonna get punished because they were smiling or because they were talking to their coworkers about a doctor's visit or about something that they heard at their grandparents' house.

Just, that's what I mean by fun.

You know, just stop creating an environment where everyone has to, you know, shelter in place when you walk into the room.

So again, that's it for episode three.

Thanks for listening.

And don't forget to check out our LinkedIn page with daily insights on how to create and maintain that unstifled environment.

Thank you.