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How to gain commitment from your team

INICEOS

Updated: Jul 26, 2022

As a leader, attempting to achieve your aspirational business goals without the commitment of your team is like trying to move water uphill with a rake. It can be frustrating, demotivating, costly and, ultimately, futile.

And yet I hear this complaint regularly from business leaders: “My team just isn’t as committed as me, and I don’t know what to do about it”.

Gaining commitment doesn’t happen naturally when you bring a group of people together and give them a set of tasks. Building a committed team is a process. In this blog I’m going to discuss a three-step process that I use with my clients to help them gain, and maintain, commitment from their team. The process is used to build high performing teams but it can also be applied to gain your team’s commitment to a specific project.


Step 1: Have a vision

Having a vision of where you want the business to be in the years ahead is crucial. If you aren’t clear about the destination yourself, how can you expect your team to see the big picture? The vision needs to be thought-through and relevant. Invite input from people in the team: what do they care about? What do they consider an aspirational vision? It ought to be vivid, so people can visualise it, and aspirational enough to excite, and slightly scare, the team. After all, no one gets excited by a mundane, easily achievable goal.

A vision provides a common purpose that unites the team members and helps them understand how they are contributing to something bigger than themselves. It also gives context to specific measurable goals and helps buy-in.

It’s important to clearly communicate the vision to the team and to keep it visible. It’s easy to lose sight of the vision after you’ve invested time in building it. Invite the team to discuss it, make it visible on company communications, both internal and external, and raise it in subsequent meetings.


Step 2: Involve the team

A common mistake I see among business leaders is that they will go through the process of creating and communicating a great vision, and consider the job done at that point. Then it’s just a matter of telling the team what they need to do to achieve the vision, in terms of specific goals and plans.

Unfortunately, your team will see these goals and plans and yours, not theirs. If there’s no ownership, there’s no commitment.

It’s important to involve your team in setting the specific goals and forming the plans. Your willingness to involve the team is a strong indicator of your trust in them, and trust builds commitment. With more junior or inexperienced teams you may have to supervise the process, but this should be achieved through guidance and coaching, rather than telling.

It’s important that you encourage risk-taking and give people permission to fail. Without this, your team’s thinking will continue to be limited by all the old constraints. If you give your team more freedom, you will no doubt get different perspectives on an issue and it may help you see things you hadn’t previously considered. You’re also more likely to identify more creative solutions to difficult challenges.

For your team, the process of setting goals and forming plans will enable them to learn and practise new valuable problem-solving skills that will help them develop and become better in their roles. It will also teach and re-enforce concepts like responsibility and accountability which lead to greater levels of commitment.



Step 3: Consistently review

Once the specific goals and plans are in place, and roles are assigned, agree a process of review. How will you capture and measure progress? Who is responsible for reporting, how and when? What meetings need to be in place, both team and one-to-one?

Reviews will measure progress and assess past performance, but they should also be used to agree what needs to change in the future. Even when things are going according to plan, always encourage your team to find ways to be better.

Finally, give feedback regularly. It should be direct, timely and well-intentioned. Feedback shouldn’t be reserved for review meetings or for when things aren’t going well. Catch people doing something right and tell them what you observed shortly after. Acknowledge and praise the activity, rather than the end result, so that people know what they’ve done well and they will feel encouraged to do more of it.

An excited, united and involved team with a clear focus and direction is a committed team. And commitment is the basis of a high performing team.


If you’d like to know more about how you can build a high performing team, contact me on info@iniceos.com and we can set up a call.

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