How to Better Influence Your Team as a Manager
At its core, leading and managing a team at work is about influence. To better influence your team as a manager means building strong and trusting relationships to set the foundation for empathy, constructive debate, alignment, and accountability. Done right, managers can elevate their influence and foster team norms that help facilitate collective team success.
4 Steps to Better Influence Your Team as a Manager
We know from people manager assessment data that influential managers are effective managers. And we know that most new manager training participants struggle to influence their teams.
- Build a Foundation of Individual and Team Trust
While it may feel like you do not have the time to focus on “touchy-feely stuff” compared to “getting work done,” trust is the bedrock for team effectiveness and results. To better influence your team as a manager, prioritize the establishment of trust within your team. Invest the time to build the psychological team safety required for team members to feel safe enough to fully express their ideas, concerns, and opinions without fear of judgment or repercussion.When individual and team trust is high, your influence as a leader increases because team members are more likely to be open to and align with your vision and goals.
Do your managers know how to build a high trust work culture?
- Create Strategic Clarity
Our organizational alignment research found that strategic clarity accounts for 31% of difference between high and low performance in terms of revenue growth, profitability, customer loyalty, leadership effectiveness, and employee engagement. To better influence your team as a manager, invest the time to achieve strategic clarity at the individual, team and organizational levels.That means communicating a clear and compelling vision, mission, values, strategic priorities, and plan for success. It is hard to influence a team when goals, roles, success metrics, and processes are unclear. When every team member has a clear line of sight to what matters most, it is easier to influence both behaviors and results.
Do your managers know how to co-create a team charter to ensure their teams are rowing in the same direction?
- Encourage Constructive Debate
Disagreements are bound to occur on teams due to people different experiences, ideas, and agendas. Unhealthy disagreements create employee disengagement, toxic work cultures, and workplace politics. Healthy and constructive disagreements allow different perspectives to emerge, promote creativity, build connections, mitigate risks, and increase people’s commitment to decisions.Do your managers know how to embrace diverse perspectives, encourage team members to challenge ideas respectfully, and change their minds when necessary?
- Promote Accountability at Every Level
Creating high levels of individual, team, and organizational accountability is the final step to increase and reinforce leadership influence. When leaders and team members hold themselves and each other responsible for delivering on commitments, leadership influence grows. When accountability is low or inconsistent, a corporate version of survival of the fittest gets played through unhealthy workplace politics.Do you managers know how to create a healthy culture of accountability?
The Bottom Line
Building influence within your team requires trust, clarity, open debate, and accountability to collective results. If you weave these steps into your leadership approach, you will be on your way to building a high performing team.
To learn more about how to better influence your team as a manager, download How to Understand Workplace Politics Strategies to Influence Others