A team culture that productively challenges one another.
Fear can stop the greatest idea from being shared. I’ve seen so many team members who are fearful of the negative consequences of openly speaking their minds. Having a closed-off team can kill productivity and innovation.
Leaders are often putting out fires that could have been prevented in the first place if the team could openly share. Instead of putting out the fires, prevents them from happening in the first place.
But how do we create that space? Today I share a clip of the interview I had with Eric Burd who is the Chief Sales Officer at Welk Resorts.
I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Eric Burd in action. As a business consultant who works with leaders to develop team cultures, I know he is a fantastic example of who many leaders strive to be!
In this clip Eric speaks to creating a team culture of openness which has allowed some of his team meetings to go from an hour down to ten minutes.
Transcription
And as you were talking about previously how you make sure to reinforce people challenging you and people speaking up in meetings. I just imagined, you know, we're all human and we have these childlike moments. So in my head, I am imagined like all those leaders as like little kids standing behind mom going like this and then feeling safe to then walk in front of mom. Then they get closer and closer and closer to the playground and then they get to start to play. I think that's kind of the environment that you're creating for adult in the leadership world is letting people feel safe enough to be able to open up and come closer and closer. Becoming more authentic and more authentic and create the space where we can all figure out how can we play nice with one another?
And you know speaking to that metaphor, you know, what ultimately starts to happen is it's going we're going to the park, later mom not hiding behind mom anymore. They're just right down the slide right? There was no there's no hesitancy because again, that's something that cost time it costs energy. And right now we need to be ridiculously optimized.
We're still navigating through a pandemic Right? We're still understaffed. So we need to be so effective with our communications that you know, we don't have time for that hour long call, you know, we need to be able to communicate in a way to where we feel safe enough to say. Hey, this is what's going on. Let's get down to the bottom. Let's figure this out and come up with a solution in five minutes. And it's so fun because we go. Wow, that was great. All right. Well good. We're all good. All right, cool. Y'all just got 50 minutes back on your calendar.
You know, those are just the coolest calls and that's something that's so satisfying to me is when we get to that point to where the communications are so transparent and they're just ridiculously optimized. You start to really understand when people are always sharing how they feel you can sense exactly how someone will respond to something, you know, so you can just communicate in a way that is ridiculously effective. And again, that's just how we have to be right now. So it's been really cool to see how the team has really adopted that type of partnership.