Maintaining Team Motivation Through The Troughs
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Energize your team as we move out of the pandemic with a series of three, one-hour virtual learning events. The months ahead will present new challenges as business needs change, blended working environments begin to take shape, and leaders are once again forced to adjust to rapid change and uncertainty. Help ready your people to lead and perform through the next phase with a series of virtual learning events.
TWO TRACKS TO CHOOSE FROM
Develop your people in the areas that will benefit them most. Choose our leadership track to build your team’s coaching and collaboration capabilities, or choose our resilience track to build your team’s ability to perform under pressure.LEADERSHIP TRACK Develop high performing leaders.
3×4 Coaching
Drawing on a wealth of experience from our 30+ years of working with the world’s top coaches, 3×4 Coaching introduces the 3 Plays and 4 Skills great coaches use to build commitment and get results.Building High-Performing Teams
Basketball coach Roy Rana has built high performing teams at every level from high school to the NBA. Drawing on years of experience, he will share what he has learned about how to create an environment in which a team is more than the sum of its parts.Working With People You Don’t Understand
Introduce participants to the relationship between their mindsets, behaviours and results, and take them on an interactive tour of how adopting new mindsets of curiosity and generosity can make those behaviours automatic.
RESILIENCE TRACK Enhance performance under pressure.
Building Resilience
High performance is not possible without pressure. The Building Resilience keynote introduces a personal resilience toolkit used by elite athletes to develop a relationship with stress and pressure that puts them in the driver’s seat.Maintaining Team Motivation Through the Troughs
When teams face challenging times, leaders have four allies to preserve motivation and fight the tide of disillusionment. This session brings these allies to life with stories from people who have used them under incredible pressure.The Power of Pressure
Drawing insights from his book, The Power of Pressure: Why Pressure isn’t the Problem, it’s the Solution, Dane Jensen’s new keynote address introduces three powerful strategies for using pressure as an advantage.
DELIVERED BY A WORLD-CLASS FACULTY
Our speakers teach at top business schools, have coached Olympic and professional athletes, been Olympic athletes, consulted at the highest level of business, and practiced law. Their strong personalities and unique personal experience draw audiences in and keep learners engaged.LEARN MORE
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The relationship is the engine; emotion is the fuel
Every engine needs fuel, and in the coaching relationship there is no stronger fuel than emotion. Much of the time in business we’re taught to keep emotions in check – especially negative emotions like anger, frustration and disappointment. Since it’s rare to see these kinds of emotions expressed, it can be triggering when our people show their dissatisfaction. It can feel like an attack, and the default response can be to mirror the emotion – meet anger with anger – or become defensive.Every engine needs fuel, and in the coaching relationship there is no stronger fuel than emotion.Falling into this trap, however, robs you of the opportunity to direct the energy in that emotion in a productive direction. When a team member expresses negative emotion, it means they care. When leaders make an effort to notice and acknowledge the emotion, they can deepen the relationship and build trust. And by exploring the emotion, they can help their people see what’s possible and use their feelings as motivation to take a step in the right direction. In these situations, the relationship is what allows the coach to lean into the emotion and explore it. In our 3×4 Coaching program, we give participants challenges to apply key learnings back on the job. In one of these challenges, a participant committed to asking their people simple questions like, “What’s new from the weekend?” much more frequently than they had before. Asking more, personal questions helped this leader build rapport with their people. And it provided the leader with new insight into their people’s emotions. In the course of these conversations, this leader noticed that the emotion in the person’s response provided a deeper view to valuable information. By leaning into those emotions and exploring them further, the leader was able to learn more about how they were interpreting their experiences. Noticing what made them frustrated, anxious, fearful, or even happy and excited, improved the leader’s ability to identify and address their team’s issues and challenges. With stronger relationships in place, and positive results beginning to emerge, it wasn’t long before the leader began asking more direct questions to gain a deeper understanding of their people’s feelings. Equipped with better information, the leader was able to give more and more targeted support and feedback to enable their team’s success. As a leader and a coach, the relationship you have with your people is what allows you to help them be at their best. When leaders give their relationships the care they need and lean into emotions, they can drive higher levels of performance, and ultimately results.
Make the most of your investment
Investing time in building relationships pays dividends. And yet, all the other pressures don’t go away just because you’ve decided to put your time into this endeavour. To optimize the benefits of relationship building given the reality of time constraints, smart coaches create a strategy for how they’re going to build and maintain their relationships every day. What this comes down to is showing people that you care. That means making time for them, offering them support when they’re struggling, and doing both with unwavering consistency. But every person is different, and what works for one person might not work for another. When you’re working to build relationships with the people you lead, make a point of understanding:- What are their strengths?
- What motivates them, specifically?
- What is the best way to communicate with them?
Putting it all together
Productivity is the direct result of an effective team. When everyone is engaged and making a strong personal contribution, efficiency follows. And the greatest influence on performance and engagement is the team’s leader; their coach. But which leader garners the higher level of engagement and commitment: the leader who focuses first on task execution? Or the leader who works to build relationships and earn permission to coach their people to a higher level of performance? In your next round of one-on-one meetings, take the time to consider your relationship with the person you’re leading. You might just find that when you move your focus from the to-do list to the person, productivity follows.Maintaining Team Motivation Through The Troughs
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As the pandemic drags on, maintaining motivation and engagement is an increasing challenge for leaders.
Significant prolonged uncertainty, a relentless volume of work, the collapse of a separation between work and home life, and – in some cases – the absence of traditional sources of motivation like raises, promotions, and informal camaraderie in the office, means motivation has rarely been harder to come by.
In this 60-minute webinar, Third Factor CEO Dane Jensen will uncover research that will help you zero in on your team’s emotional state, and introduce four allies leaders can tap into to fight against the tide of disillusionment and keep people energized, resilient and motivated through the months to come.
You’ll leave with a better understanding of your team’s emotional state, and practical ideas for maintaining motivation that you can start using right away.
You should attend if:
- You are responsible for leadership development and want new ideas for driving operational efficiency
- Your performance management strategy calls for improvement in employee engagement and leadership efficacy
- Uncertainty and fatigue caused by the pandemic is having a negative impact on your business
- You want to build your own ability to motivate your people over the months ahead
About the presenter:
Dane Jensen advises senior leaders and their teams on how to perform under pressure in our disruptive world.
Dane has worked with executives in 23 countries on 5 continents. As CEO of Third Factor, Dane oversees delivery of the firm’s leadership development programs throughout North America. Dane is Affiliate Faculty with UNC Executive Development at Kenan-Flagler Business School in Chapel Hill, NC. He also teaches in the full-time and executive MBA programs at the Smith School of Business, Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada.
In addition to his corporate and academic work, Dane advises athletes, coaches, leaders, and boards in the Olympic and Paralympic sport systems. He is author of The Power of Pressure: Why Pressure Isn’t the Problem, It’s the Solution (HarperCollins, 2021), and a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review. He lives in Toronto with his wife and their three children.
🧹 People who think highly of themselves might brush off the piece of corrective feedback, giving more weight to the positive news surrounding it.
😟 But those who are self-critical might dwell on the bad news and miss out on the good.
🐍 And the lack of direct communication makes people feel like they’re victims of a sneak attack.
Instead, Peggy offers simple advice for leaders who need to give feedback: Describe the behaviour you want to reinforce or correct, explain the impact of the behaviour, and outline what you want them to do. Click here to read the article on hbr.org. In our 3×4 Coaching virtual learning journey, participants are given challenges to apply what they’ve learned on the job. In this video, our Chief Learning Officer, Peggy Baumgartner, showcases how one program participant used a challenge activity to make a lasting difference in his organization. When it comes to coaching, it’s not about what you know; it’s what you do that ultimately matters. That’s why we make challenge activities a part of our online learning journeys. Participants are given a challenge and encouraged to make note of what works for them and what impact it had. One participant, taking the 3×4 Coaching program through Queen’s Executive Education, really took his challenge on recognition to heart. Following the challenge, Dave Cooper shared that he had written a letter to his team to recognize their contributions through the pandemic. As the manager of retail leadership development for Sport Chek, a major retailer with approximately 250 stores, his team had been hard hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. “Our training team got very disconnected from the stores, which was really difficult for me personally and difficult for our team,” Dave told us. “After going through eight months of this constant stress, I wanted to see if I could write something to recognize what they’d accomplished how long they had endured. And maybe give them a little nudge that they have more in them.” Dave’s letter to his team was particularly effective because it took all the key concepts from the recognition module and used them in a very powerful way:- Make it relevant. Dave’s first success was in his timing. Rather than waiting until everything had settled down, he took the time to recognize his people in the moment and let them know they were seen.
- Focus on the behavior, not results. In the letter, Dave recognized his people not for the results, but for their efforts. “You and your team have persevered well over 200 days,” the letter reads. “This is an incredible achievement!”
- Make it a habit. Dave told us that he didn’t want it to be a one-time thing. Rather than writing a letter to his team and calling it job done, he set reminders in his calendar for future times he know would be busy to remind himself to recognize his team.
- Extend influence & ownership to others. The impact of Dave’s letter didn’t stop at his direct reports. He challenged them to pay it forward: “thank your management teams, your full-timers, your part-timers and anyone else who has contributed to your store’s success,” he wrote. “Everyone plays a role!”
“Let me give you some feedback on that.”“Then use a verbal yellow highlighter,” I responded. “Whenever I have to give anybody feedback, and I want to to make sure it’s been heard and recognized as feedback, I always use the word feedback and emphasize it… as in ‘let me give you some feedback on that.’” On the next day of the program she walked up to me and said “Oh my gosh that was so simple, and it will make a big difference. In thinking back to my conversations with my employees I realized that very often when I was actually giving them some feedback I rarely used the word feedback, so they didn’t recognize it as such when they were asked.” It will definitely help the employees’ performance and, secondarily the results on her 360 feedback. Negative emotion is an incredibly volatile fuel. Our CEO, Dane Jensen, lays out how to harness its energy for building motivation in his latest article for Harvard Business Review titled Turn Your Team’s Frustration into Motivation. In the article, Dane offers three tools for leaders to motivate people facing a setback:
🏷 Label the negative emotion and engage. Right or wrong, giving it a name helps uncover important information that can be used for moving forward. 👏 Feed the self-coach, not the self-critic. Encourage them to look for the opportunity in the crisis. 🛴 Channel energy to action. Use the moment to build a vision of a better future and build clarity around what it takes to get there.
Strong leaders don’t shy away from negative emotions. They lean into them and help their people use them to recover and grow. Click here to read the article on hbr.org. The nature of work has changed. And for many, things won’t be going back to “normal” – ever. As people adapt to their new realities, the mix of new responsibilities, new communication systems, changes to meetings and protocols and the associated ambiguity can lead to friction, anxiety and stress. When we think about collaboration, we often go straight to tools and technology. But guess what? Your organization is full of human beings, and as humans our ability to work together begins with our individual interactions. Before any technology can enable effective collaboration, the people using it need skills to understand, engage and appreciate the people they work with. In this interactive, 60-minute online session, Cyndie Flett will explore the mindsets and behaviours that lead to productive and collaborative interactions, break down how individual interactions set the tone and influence how effectively a group works together, and look at a few practical tools you can use to manage relationships and enhance collaboration so you can achieve more of the results you want, and manage your own health and wellbeing along the way- You are a senior leader, learning & development practitioner, or HR professional responsible for enabling collaboration at an organizational level
- Rapid change to when and how you work is causing friction within the teams you lead
- You need solutions for enabling effective collaboration that transcend modes and methods of work
- You want to build your own capability for working more productively with others
Cyndie Flett is one of Canada’s leading experts on coaching. As the former Vice President of Research and Development for the Coaching Association of Canada, and Director of the National Coaching Certification Program, Cyndie has dramatically impacted the way that literally millions of coaches are educated across the country.