Title
Shout about your team wins at work. Praise your team to your boss. Too many managers stay silent and hope their bosses notice their good performance. They feel embarrassed or don’t feel confident enough to shout about team achievements. I am hoping to change that today for you.
Other managers shout too loudly about themselves and alienate team members and bosses. Shouting about yourself is much more likely to cause you problems than get you noticed. Avoid shouting too loudly or too often about yourself. Instead shout about how your team has done.
Communicate Your Successes – How To Shout About Your Team Wins At Work
- A Manager’s performance is their team’s performance
- Take Action to Communicate wins
- 5 Practical actions you should take to shout about your team at work
For any manager performing at an average level or better, when compared to your peers, what we discuss today will help you get noticed, get on boss’s and leadership team member’s radar, develop your reputation, increase your influence and impact, and get you promoted more quickly.
You and your team getting noticed for all the right reasons is great for:
- Increasing your credibility and everyone’s trust in your competence as a manager
- Providing you with greater influence and visibility across your organisation
- Increasing your team’s morale, confidence and motivation
- Building you and your team’s confidence in what you are doing
- Increases you and your team’s autonomy and ability to make impactful decisions
- Making it easier and cheaper to attract talented individuals into the team
I was promoted 13 times in my career all the way up to board level. I had plenty of colleagues that worked just as hard as me, but they didn’t get promoted as quickly. Part of the reason was how I went about ensuring bosses and team members understood what, we as a team, had achieved and how it helped my boss and the company.
Proactivity, having a plan and taking action to communicate achievements will get you a lot further. Bosses and leaders are increasingly time poor and pressurised so getting noticed is harder and harder without proactive action.
So why am I suggesting that you spend a lot more effort to shout about your team rather than yourself?
Watch on YouTube
Listen on Podcast
A Manager’s performance is their team’s performance
This is very important to know, believe and use as a manager. No-one really likes people who shout about themselves.
Most people are very happy when you shout about someone else or about them. Shout about your team progress and your team achievements. Your team members will be very happy with you. A manager signing your praises is motivational, creates loyalty and a lot of goodwill.
When a manager shouts about their team’s performance, they are also indirectly shouting about their own performance. A manager doesn’t have to say a thing about themselves and plenty of people will make the connection.
What is even better – you have so many reasons to shout about your team performance and progress as part of good communications in a business. There are much fewer reasons to shout about your own performance.
Shout about your team at work. Shout about how your team has done. Praise your team to your boss.
Next, if you don’t have a plan and take action to communicate wins, you and your team’s achievements will just get lost in the sea of hard working people in your business.
Take Action to Communicate wins
Everyone is so busy and under pressure. Gone are the days that bosses and stakeholders really notice everything you are up to UNLESS you make it really easy for them.
Your plan should start with your boss. This is the most important person to keep up to date with all your team’s achievements and wins. It is always psychologically easier and less intimidating to start communicating to one person you already have a relationship with.
Your boss wants and needs to know WHAT you and your team are doing. They can’t really do their job if they don’t know. Your boss can’t appreciate what they don’t know about.
Set yourself an initial target. I would update my boss at least once per week on all the important initiatives the team are working on. I will give an update on progress. Personally, I like to talk to my boss every other day or so – that is 2-3 times per week. I feel once per week is not enough. I want to get face to face time if possible, then I would call my boss and finally if they were really hard to get hold of, I would email them.
Praise your team to your boss regularly so your boss knows exactly what is happening, what is being done next and how the team is progressing against targets.
The other group you should keep just as up to date on progress is your own team. Get them proud of their own achievements; of how the team is progressing, and they will update others in the business. They do some of your work for you. Communicate team progress towards goals 3-5 times per week. Use different methods – team meetings, huddles, emails, put it on the wall, etc
When you are regularly communicating progress to your boss and then your team, create a target list of other stakeholders that might benefit from updates from you. They can then co-ordinate their work better, or plan better or have confidence you will deliver on time.
Create a plan of contact points or communication habits and take action to shout about your team at work.
5 Practical actions you should take to shout about your team at work
1- Link Actions to Results
When you are shouting about your team, do your best to link actions and activities to results. This is not always appropriate. The more often and the clearer you can link actions to results, the more credit your team will get and as a result, you will get.
An example – “We added two steps into the process, one being a quick phone call to the client, which has resulted in clients paying 4 days earlier on average. That means we have an additional £2.3 million in our bank account as a result.”
Link action to measurable results whenever you can.
2 – Give Progress Updates
Give a lot of progress updates. Bosses love progress updates. They create confidence that you have not forgotten about a key deliverable and you will deliver what you promised when you promised it. Progress updates give you a great platform to shout about the team.
For example, popping round to your boss, you might say “I just want to give you a quick update on the ABC cost project. The team have been doing brilliantly, working together with the design team. They have gone through every component and assembly process. So far, they have identified £3.42 of savings per unit without compromising quality. This will translate into almost £1.9million of savings over the year. We are expanding the project to cover every product in that category.”
Use team progress updates to praise your team to your boss and communicate your team wins. Also update your boss on the bad news. I think a no surprises policy is very sensible to keep your boss happy and build their confidence in you.
3 – Create Team KPIs
Another very useful action is to create a team KPI scorecard. Make sure you link every KPI you use through to a component of company strategy. Explain each KPI and link to your boss. You can then use your scorecard to quantify the team progress made and shout about your team wins. KPI scorecards are great to shout about your team achievements.
4 – Use Prizes
Fourth, Team and team member prizes are another great way to shout about team progress at work. Set team progress milestones and add prizes against achieving each milestone ahead of time. As you get nearer hitting the final target, the prizes could increase in value. Think of all the different types of prizes for which you don’t need a budget: praise, recognition, shout outs, coming in late, extra holiday or you doing their job for a morning. Get creative. Then think about prizes that need some budget and put those into action too. Be creative and create a sense of fun in the team too. Then you can think of options external to the company, such as regional or sector prizes.
5 – Create “Newsletters”
Fifth, create newsletters, email updates, reports and other written updates that you can circulate more widely to key team stakeholders and possibly leadership team members. Let your boss know what you are planning first. You could also plan a series of 5 minute update meetings with each key stakeholder each month. Plan out and action how you will communicate your team wins more widely in your company.
All of these actions take some courage, confidence and a bit of work to start doing. Once you have started, it becomes a lot easier. Take one of the actions you are not doing and start it this week. Create a habit, so you get into a rhythm to shout about your team at work.
in summary
Your team’s success is your success as a manager. Shouting about your team is much easier and more acceptable than shouting about yourself. Shout about your team at work.
Here are the 5 actions I suggest you start doing or improve doing to shout about you team wins at work
- Link actions and activity to results when you communicate your team wins
- Give a lot of progress updates to shout about your team achievements
- Create a team KPI scorecard and use this to shout about team progress
- Use team and team member prizes as a communication tool
- Create written updates that you can circulate to key team stakeholders
For coaching to intelligently communicate you wins widely at work, to get more recognition, to increase your standing and influence at work, and to get promoted quicker visit us at enhance.training and select coaching or send me an email at support@enhance.training
If you have any questions on “Shout About Your Team Wins At Work – Praise Your Team To Your Boss”, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
Build Management Expertise Quickly
Access all our prize winning management expertise to stand out from your peers, increase your confidence and credibility and take years off your future promotions.
We share a ton of content, e-books, help sheets and more to save you a ton of time and move your next pay rise much closer. Click the link to find out more about the Management Skills Hub
Navigation
