Since the start of the year I’ve noticed many leaders grappling with big new annual targets. After a long 2021 and a short festive break, the prospect of rallying for another round of targets can be daunting. Especially when the ripple effects of the Great Resignation are still being felt and employee turnover is expected to increase further:
40% are considering leaving their jobs in the next 3-6 months. According to Mckinsey
65% of workers say they feel less connected to their co-workers
77% say they see being connected to colleagues as the most important factor in staying at a job.
32% (one in three) UK workers plan on handing in their resignations in the next 12 months.
40% of employees would be willing to work harder in their roles if they were happier at work.
Against this backdrop it can feel challenging to rally yourself, let alone others. The business case is clear. It is a leader’s job to first inspire themselves and then to inspire those around them. Not only for employee engagement and retention’s sake – but ultimately for smashing your business’s targets this year.
So for 2022, how do you build useful beliefs that will get the best engagement and performance from you and your team? How can you smash your 2022 targets by building your team’s beliefs?
On our recent webinar held on the March 2nd, Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? Co-founder Tom Barry and I set out to answer exactly that. We really enjoyed sharing 3 key practical strategies and our recent client stories with everyone who made it on the day. I thought I’d share my 3 top takeaway recommendations from the session as well as some video snippets of each:
STRATEGY ONE: Understand and develop the four key areas that build beliefs.
Beliefs are the bedrock of motivation, energy and confidence. Our beliefs surrounding our work can influence our feelings, attitudes and emotions. These can drive our behaviours, actions and decisions and can impact our performance and ripple on to affect our results. By developing useful underlying beliefs for ourselves, we can start to orient our actions around what is in our control to bring about a positive result.
In order to start building positive beliefs, it’s important to first understand how beliefs are formed and where ours may need some work. As Tom describes in the video below, use our DICE acronym to help you understand what forms the “4 wheels on the bus” that need to be “pumped up to run smoothly” to develop your own useful beliefs. Where are you feeling confident? What area are you lacking in?
STRATEGY TWO: Regularly seek out the evidence as to why you can smash your 2022 targets
For those areas of concern in your DICE belief, try thinking about the below. After 7 years of rowing there was still plenty for me to improve. Sometimes it felt like there was too much! The force-change curve I share below was definitive proof to me that I can change. This was a turning point for me by seeing that improvement, however marginal. Not that I had nailed my technique and we had the Gold medal done and dusted. But rather, that I knew I was capable of improving. That belief began with me seeing it in the evidence. For your DICE belief, what evidence can you gather to counteract those concerns? Try building an evidence wall of examples that overturn the concerns.
STRATEGY THREE: Help others regularly seek out their evidence as to why you can do it as a team
Lastly, a key part of leadership is to excite others to achieve a higher level of performance. We help leaders work to find what’s good for your employees and what’s good for the company. Try constructing your evidence wall with your team to capture your team’s evidence. As Tom suggests, we run weekly sessions internally with our team on sharing our highlights from the week to help build belief around our goals. These don’t have to be big things but what are your team’s small wins? What have we as a team done that show we’re headed in the right direction?
Be it client feedback, relationships in the team or things everyone’s personally enjoyed, to build belief that you can smash your 2022 targets.
Tom and I were struck how belief is something that can be built over time. While often overlooked, beliefs play a key role in performance, as well as the likelihood we’ll achieve the results we’d like to see. As such, it’s important to think through your own deliberate process for developing useful beliefs for yourself and instilling that in others.
If you’d like to chat to us to learn more about how we help businesses do all of the above exercises and more, please feel free to book a no-strings attached call with us via our contact page. We’d love to hear more about your key challenges and to share our expertise. All the best for forming your beliefs and achieving your targets!
