How Well Your People Function Is On You - Not On Them!
The technical skills or the past experiences your people bring to their work today - will not be enough for success tomorrow. Not by a long shot! What worked and is working now may even be limiting the seeing of what's needed for future financial and job security.
Understanding behaviors, motivational drivers and leveraging emotional intelligence makes for richer personal career and cross-team success. If developing behavioral and emotional intelligence as practical work skills areas aren't in your company's talent development plans - ask yourself; how you justify that omission and what you can do about it? Not your role to step up, nice excuse!
How well your people work together is on you - more than on them.
You set culture. You reinforce culture. Or you destroy culture.
Different roles require different behaviors. If it sounds stupidly simple, why are most so simply ignorant when it comes to understanding the value of diverse ways of working and behaving.
Assuming that all roles should operate with the same degree of urgency, risk tolerance and openness to change reflects an under-developed sense of situational awareness.
Role clarity that extends beyond our individual roles, clearly sees what behaviors and motivations each role needs for success and how critically important it is that different roles act differently and are motivated differently.
Just think of what would happen to your product launch integrity or your user base new product buy-in, if quality control teams operated with the same degree of urgency and pace as your sales people do - and didn't catch and correct operating flaws? I've seen both service and product line launches fail, associated stock prices drop and talented software architects responsible for design; lose their jobs - all because . . . they didn't get that full-speed-ahead-rush-to-market-speed at the cost of poor user interfacing - can and will kill adoption into even the best services and products.
Creating cultures that increase awareness of and need for diverse work styles creates environments of positive cross dependency, reliability and accountability.
When diverse work styles are recognized as essential to maintaining critical company balances between builder and expander forces and protector and sustaining forces then all those involved the need for positive inter-dependencies operate seamlessly to deliver what's needed to keep revenue flowing while dynamically growing.
When diverse operating styles are recognized and honored then sales teams understand quality control's slower rhythms. Project management teams understand marketing timelines. Finance supports new initiatives without slowing down critical time to market launch dates. Legal teams understand why sales contracts are needed quickly to close timely quarterly deals to plug into existing revenue goals and projections.
Life is about adapting. Adapting wins. Not adapting loses. When systems and people are not adapting to each other, systems bog down, processes breaks down, profits go down and jobs expire and companies die.
Different role behaviors (when those behaviors are the ones needed for role success) form a healthy check and balance, insuring scalable growth.
Healthy cultures that aren't promoting and encouraging cross-team dependencies are unhealthy cultures. Unhealthy cultures can be strongly armored and protected against competition but they are often too slow to react to changing forces and survive . Deadly cultures can thrive for sustained cycles but they won't scale and evolve over time and through change.
If you're leading isn't reinforcing cultural health and respect for diverse behavior styles, you're not leading - even though your title says that's what you're supposed to be doing.
Don't kid yourself, you're people know the kind of leader you are - regardless of your title. Your boss, peers and direct reports are looking at how well you understand not only their particular contribution value but the value their work style plays to supporting overall company success. If you're not leveraging the talent around you - jump into the antique pile.
Don't dial up how much you're reinforcing cross role dependencies - and your career gets dialed down.
Real leaders are aware leaders. They know the value of positive cross dependency. Real leaders recognize that they are dependent on others for their success - way more than those others are on them.