How do you create a safe and supportive environment for your team?

By being an example of what a safe and supportive leader looks like first, follow up with inclusive leadership actions in language and deeds.

As a leader your aim should be to clearly and consistently communicate expectations for performance. Nobody should ever have to guess ‘what’s in your head’. If you genuinely want to see engagement levels soar, start scheduling what I call monthly “Alignment Interviews.”in the Alignment Interview you do 3 simple yet powerful things: 1) Clearly review expectations 2) Offer feedback & feedforward 3) Lastly ask “How can I help?” Your team members will feel respected, listened to, and empowered. This is how true leaders build new leaders.

All team members should be worthy of praise; it’s simply a question of whether it should be acknowledged in public or private. Through one on ones you should provide private praise and feedback. Exceptional behavior or achievement should be acknowledged publicly for the rest of the team or company to see or hear. Just be careful as it is possible to over-praise, desensitizing your team members to what would normally be a positive experience.

Everyone in the organization is important and it should start from here where by leadership in the form of management or supervisor or manager or team lead should realize and recognize the contribution of everyone in the hierarchy. It should be part of organization culture and should be expected by everyone. This can be done on monthly basis or quarterly and could be part of regular performance review. Waiting for end of the year to get this done mostly results into late or irreversible outcomes. Recognition should not wait for a right time to do rather it should be done at the right time when the good work is done. Everyone likes to hear good things about them so why not reward the person then itself.

Some questions to reflect on to encourage growth include: -What was your most memorable AHA moment from a coaching session? -Where were you stretched the most recently? -What was recently the most satisfying team accomplishment?

This is sensitive and it’s gets more sensitive when discussed. Hence, understanding root cause from both sides and immediately working on resolving the conflict is best. Don’t let it grow in the minds and spread the bad mouth. Stress and conflict are silent killer and detrimental to the productivity and teamwork. It should be resolved immediately. Anything against the policy and standards have the tools to report in the system and the rest should be reported to management or authority and resolved.

In my experience, safety will not be achieved without trust. From Smart Trust by Stephen M.R. Covey, 5 Key character-based behaviors to build trust, which if followed / practiced, will lead to increased trust: ·       Talk Straight ·       Demonstrate Respect ·       Create Transparency ·       Right Wrongs ·       Show Loyalty

In my experience I have found that when the team is given the opportunity to fail, but fail and learn fast, we are able to produce better quality results. Results that move the needle. In this process I constantly remind the team regularly to "never let perfect get in the way of good" the ability to experiment safely without the fear of retribution gives the team the confidence to produce quality outcomes.