Enlightened Leadership: 5 Strategies to Guide and Motivate Your Teams

Mobilize your employees, take responsibility for your hierarchy's decisions, value work well done... Five tips to help you better manage your teams on a daily basis.

Develop your adaptability

When managing teams, you need to be able to accept playing different roles and alternate between different types of management, whether it is directive, participative, relational or delegative. You need to know how to be directive when necessary, play on emotion in other cases and always adapt to the context.

Imagine, for example, that an accident occurs in a department. The employees, worried, identify with the victim. You must first express your compassion and then, secondly, provide solutions.

Another scenario: if you have to announce a difficult decision, such as an organizational change, you must accept that employees express their feelings and let them express themselves.

Assume your role as an intermediary

It is also important to clearly define your position as a leader/manager, in other words, to assume the fact of being in solidarity with both the company's decisions and your team. However, if the two are in contradiction, you must create spaces for confrontation, so that your team feels heard and then play the role of intermediary between the two positions.

To successfully carry out this mission, it is important to communicate well by selecting the information you will transmit to your team on the one hand and by thinking about how you will present things to them on the other hand so as not to be in a false position.

Read also: The secret of Feel Good certified companies to attract and recruit the best, with Alexandra Montant

Know how to reframe your employees

A member of your team is going down the wrong path? Show moderation. Don't tell them too bluntly, nor tiptoe around it. If they get the feeling that you're going to have a negative opinion, they'll hear that they're bad. Feeling a negative value judgment, they will say "it's not me" like a child would, and enter into a justification process.

However, the objective is, on the contrary, to make them admit their mistake in order to find a solution. To do this, you must start by making them observe the facts, then ask them, remaining very calm: "What do you suggest so that this does not happen again?" Thus, you force your interlocutor to understand and find solutions but without upsetting them.

Conversely, it is essential to practice positive appreciation. When an employee has done something satisfactory, you must tell them. People need to check the quality of their work.

Motivate your troops

When you have to set a new objective for your teams, it is essential that you know how to make them want to achieve it.

To do this, you need to refine your vision of the objective and want to believe in it yourself, in order to be in the energy and conviction. It is therefore a matter of both being able to rely on factual elements - diagnosis and projections - and knowing how to transmit the desire, emotion and pleasure of sharing an adventure.

And to reassure your teams, it is finally recommended to explain very calmly the method that you intend to follow and the intermediate steps of this new project.

Empower your teams

Delegation of responsibility is an imperative. This boils down to the following question: "How do I know if I can trust them?"

However, to decide on this question, it is also important to be able to answer these questions: "Do I accept that they do it differently from me? If they make a mistake, will I start over or try to learn from it? Will I be in solidarity with the consequences? Available to help and promote their success?"

The answer is important to be able to delegate without worry and allow your employees to work autonomously.

In short, each new situation a leader faces leads them to learn to adapt or even improve. That said, there is a constant that will always allow them to succeed: it is listening.

Listening to your employees to better involve them in management decisions but also to support them in the best possible way. To be to your own listening, to convey a positive message, to anticipate difficulties and find suitable solutions.

Philippe Montant
Chief Executive Officer of ReKrute