Get Amazing Team Results – Balance Being Helpful With Being Demanding
Learn 3 practical approaches to get amazing team results by balancing being helpful with being demanding. Being a very good leader or manager is being a tightrope walker. To be very successful, be very conscious of balancing a lot of different and conflicting demands placed on you by your team, colleagues, peers, bosses, customers, suppliers and more.
One of the most important balances to get right and keep right is to balance being helpful with being demanding. The more helpful you are, the more demanding you can be. Increase both and you are much more likely to get amazing team results. And as you know, your team’s performance is your performance.
Get Amazing Team Results – Balance Being Helpful With Being Demanding
- An Inspiration
- Stop Being Too Helpful at work
- Managers – Stop Trying To Be Liked
- Demand More by Providing More to Get Amazing Team Results
Be too helpful as a manager without being demanding and your team will walk all over you. You lose the respect of the team. Co-ordination and co-operation drop. Poor behaviours creep in. Before you know it, team performance is heading downwards.
Be too demanding without being helpful and your team’s motivation starts dropping and you get burnout. Team members will start looking for easier and better jobs elsewhere. Team costs will go up. Continuity, co-ordination and co-operation drop. It doesn’t take long before team performance goes downhill.
Before I go into the 3 practical approaches, I want to share a very relevant story of a fearsome and amazing maths teacher who taught me the power – that getting this balance right – has on team performance.
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An Inspiration – Balancing Being Helpful With Being Demanding
My maths teacher was a very demanding five foot nothing lady. She expected a lot from you. She was constantly pushing you to do more, to get better, to build your skills. She kept pushing you just outside your comfort zone. To balance these demands, she also believed in you, used a lot of positive reinforcement, and went all out to help you learn and improve. She gave a lot of herself and left nothing behind. She also was a fearsome person. You did not want to get on the wrong side of her. The balance she achieved was inspirational and I and the rest of the class wanted to and worked hard to do our best. Unsurprisingly, everyone got a lot better at maths.
My best boss ever also used a very similar approach. She also got the best from the people she managed by balancing being helpful with being demanding, providing amazing support and creating unpleasant consequences if you disappoint her.
1 – Stop being too helpful to get amazing team results
For managers, it is totally in your interests to help your team develop better skills, overcome challenges and obstacles, remove problems that stop their best work etc. You can help a bit all the way through to going all out to help your team. The amount you help is not the issue.
You start being too helpful when you don’t get enough back. Be too helpful and your team starts taking advantage of you. You get run ragged. Respect for you drops and team performance follows.
Maintaining the right balance is the crucial element.
3 Helpful Tests
3 really helpful tests or approaches for you to get the right balance between being helpful and being too helpful are:
Firstly, don’t repeat the help provided too often. For example, when I explain how to do a particular task, I expect the team member to put in the effort to learn and do the task well. I prefer to explain once. I am okay with explaining twice. When I have to explain three times or more, then I feel I am being too helpful, and they are not trying hard enough.
Secondly, another way to stop being too helpful is to think carefully about where your responsibilities end and where theirs start. For example explaining and teaching how to follow-up with sales leads is different from following up yourself on behalf of team members. Teach your team how to do their jobs better but don’t do their jobs for them.
Clearly set your boundaries between your responsibilities and theirs and stick to them. Be very helpful to a point. Then stop being helpful and start asking them to deliver what is expected of them.
Thirdly, a good test to stop being too helpful at work is to think about what you are giving to your team member and what they are giving back to you. If you consistently give more than you get back, it is a sure sign you need to stop being too helpful!
Create clear sensible boundaries and stick to them! Work at maintaining the right give and take balance.
2 – Managers – stop trying to be liked, aim to be respected instead
If your character NEEDS other people to like you, or if your DESIRE to be liked outweighs your responsibility as a manager to drive better team performance, managing others is probably not a good career choice for you.
Being a successful manager or leader requires you to do the best you can for your team as a whole. That includes making tough decisions and unpopular choices.
I personally have seen plenty of managers focus more on being liked than doing their best for their team. Ironically, these managers end up not being liked by their team for the right reasons and not being liked by their bosses. Neither leads to good job security as a manager.
Stop Trying To Be Liked
Stop trying to be liked. Instead aim to be respected. There are ton of things that you can do be respected as a manager, some being:
- Work hard to improve the working lives of your team members
- Set clear goals and expectations and consistently stick to these. Your team will feel safer, more motivated and have a clearer purpose.
- Be there for your team. Demonstrate that you have their back and that you trust them, day in day out.
- Put in the effort to develop your team members and move them closer to achieving their ambitions
- Protect your team from low value requests, fighting over resources, politics, too many changes of direction etc
- Balance what you give with what you ask for from your team
The more effective you are at helping your team maximise their potential and creating the right environment for great performance, the more respect you will get as a manager.
The amount of respect you get is a directly linked to how competent you are as a manager or leader.
Focus on being good at your job, as a manager, and respect will follow.
3 – demand more by providing more to get amazing team results
We all want to be treated fairly. A fair exchange is ingrained in human nature. The minute we feel we are being unfairly treated we start resisting. We reduce our efforts to get back to that fair balance.
When we are being given a lot; when the balance is unfairly to our advantage – when asked – we will happily do more to make the exchange fairer. Use this dynamic to your advantage.
Give your team more and demand more from them. Keep increasing both sides of the equation and you can demand and get a lot more from any team. PLUS they will like you for it and certainly respect you a lot as a manager.
Actions you should consider
- Setting clear expectations that push each individual team member to give a little more, to move them a little outside their comfort zone.
- Set demanding goals for the team and work hard with the team to work out how the team will reach those goals and then put those tasks, activities and projects into action.
- Use the power of positive reinforcement. Praise great actions, decisions, behaviour and of course results. Make a big thing of the right actions and results.
- Clearly and visibly work to make it easier to implement all the activities and projects the team is working on. Stop distractions. Fight to give them enough space and focus. Communicate and share information regularly and honestly.
- Fight hard to get and keep resources and ensure they are in place when needed.
- Treat each person as individuals. Take into account their strengths, their interests, their ambitions and their personal goals. Flex your approach to their needs.
- Work hard to develop your team members. Better skills or a more balanced range of skills will build team resilience, capability and increase team performance.
The more you provide to your team, the more you can ask from your team. Always check how well you are maintaining a fair exchange. This approach does require additional work on your part. You need to work out if the rewards this approach creates are worth it to you. They always were for me. Work smartly before working harder!
The more you provide your team, the more demanding you can be without negatively impacting team motivation and performance
in summary
To get amazing team results and the best team performance you can, work on balancing being helpful with being demanding.
Being helpful to your team is an incredibly important part of being a good manager. Equally important is keeping a good balance with being demanding. Your team should feel they are getting a fair deal, not a cushy deal or a bad deal.
If you have any questions on “Get Amazing Team Results – Balance Being Helpful With Being Demanding”, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
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