Stepping into a leadership role is a huge accomplishment. Leadership provides opportunities for personal and professional advancement. On a personal level, you can influence those around you. At the professional level, you gain greater responsibility for departmental initiatives and become a motivational force in your organization.
As a leader, providing solutions to challenges based on your experience and expertise is a gift you can offer your team. During your leadership journey, it can be helpful to reflect on your actions and evaluate where your leadership has excelled, where you have failed, and where you have infused knowledge into your team.
When evaluating what you think you do well, consider how your leadership has energized your team with efficiency and a sense of purpose. When evaluating opportunities for improvement, note what actions caused the failure and how you can fix similar problems in the future. As you do so, outline each person affected by your actions and their energy level. This includes your own energy levels. While your leadership strategy can bring joy and passion to your role, it's also important to be aware that your actions may be depleting rather than energizing. After all, whether you realize it or not, your energy directly impacts your team and those around you.
Here are three curiosity-based strategies you can use to motivate and re-energize your team.
1. Focus on the solution and how the team will arrive at it.
Your role as a leader is directly tied to the success of your department and the organization as a whole. This forces us to naturally make the right choice when faced with any decision. The challenge, however, is that while a solution may work for you, it doesn't necessarily work for everyone on your team.
Detaching yourself from how your team arrives at the final solution is a meaningful strategy for building confidence in your team. By empowering your team to design their own path to success, you can repurpose your energy into leading and managing.
Continue to provide guidance based on your experience to help your team arrive at an effective final solution. At the same time, let your team members know that you are open to their creative input and welcome their own interpretations of the problem, while emphasizing end goals and deadlines. If questions arise, make sure they know they have support. If you notice areas of opportunity in their approach, be curious about why they chose that behavior, and help them understand where they can adjust to strengthen their energy and approach.
2. Respond by combining questions and answers.
It's only natural to answer when asked a question. As a leader, you may already be experiencing many of the same challenges your team is facing. Providing answers on the spot seems like the easiest and fastest way to deal with urgent problems. But what happens when you are asked the same question over and over again? Notice the change in energy from excitement to irritation.
To refrain from providing answers to every question posed, respond with questions instead of answers. When you solve someone's problem, you deny your team members an opportunity to learn and grow.
Start with a question so your team members can find their own answers. Questions allow members to consider the best solutions from their own perspectives and boost their energy levels by knowing that they have the power to find the answers themselves.
3. Encourage your team to come up with a solution to the challenge.
When employees practice finding their own answers through leadership questions, they gain confidence and energy in proposing possible solutions to challenges that arise. Encourage your team to come up with any number of viable solutions by giving them room to be creative, fail, and ultimately find the best solution.
Provide your team with structure to ensure alignment of expectations. This way, your team understands your thinking and how their solution impacts larger efforts across the organization.
In your role as a leader, leading with curiosity will not only inspire confidence and positive energy in your employees, but it will also give you more time and energy to inject excitement into your work.
