Engagement is highly misunderstood and underutilized within teams and the professional workforce. Team members need that crucial engagement with each other, managers, executives, outside knowledge, and even faced with their own skill goals. Understanding team engagement as well as knowing when and how to lead it in the first place is the first vital step for any leader.
Why should I lead team engagement?
A great team that has high engagement delivers great projects. Engagements are perfect ways to extend knowledge and allow your team to take at not only their skills and hidden talents, but others as well.
Knowledge sharing can be useful for not only specific projects employees are working on, but in their personal lives as well. Often so that a member of a team that has been in their role for a long period of time is “stuck” in a static position doing their regular role and using their normal skills. This is where those hidden and sometimes undiscovered skills and interests come out and really shine – which can be used in work and play a large role in team building outside of the office and into their personal lives.
How can I get started?
Many teams choose to host weekly hours at the end of a work day to discuss knowledge sharing that pertains to both personal and professional lives, as pointed out as extremely beneficial above.
Another direct team engagement activity is instead of that boring meeting, start a brainstorming session. This will get your team’s creative juices flowing and really contribute to those tough projects while getting your team together and growing. You never know when someone will come up with the next big idea that adds tremendous value to a project or a client’s account.
There’s a complimentary matter that plays into team engagement to another level. That’s what is called having a transparent team with high values. A transparent team shares project details, ideas, and innovations on a regular basis to create a high value and feedback centric environment.
A transparent team means bringing everyone and anyone on the team to provide their feedback and ideas on projects that have high value to the business and workforce. Transparent teams share often, discuss everything, and never waste valuable time on unmeaningful work in collaboration or privately.
Mix and Fit To Your Team
What does your team have a high-value focus on? It’s up to a leader to step up and identify what the focus of the entire team is on. If the focus is formal rather an informal discussions, you want have a high enough engagement for the creativity and engagement to run smoothly together.
Find the proper mix of formal and informal discussion and engagement, and you will have a high valued team that just works together in a mannered way.