5 Reasons To Let Your Team Struggle Today

#SridharPeddisetty #Leadership #Management #Motivational #Inspirational #ProductiveTeams #TeamMotivation   
A man found a cocoon of a butterfly. One day a small opening appeared, he sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through that little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could and it could go no farther. Then the man decided to help the butterfly, so he took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily. But it had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings. The man continued to watch the butterfly because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would enlarge and expand to be able to support the body, which would contract in time. Neither happened! In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings. It never was able to fly. What the man in his kindness and haste did not understand was that the restricting cocoon and the struggle required for the butterfly to get through the tiny opening were God’s way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom from the cocoon.

Struggles are exactly what we need in our life to emerge stronger and smarter. Same philosophy is at times applicable when your team is struggling. As a leader, create safety net just enough not to let the team fail completely but mentor the team to face the adversities themselves. In my earlier post 'Empower Your Team To Own Responsibilities’, I shared why its important to empower your team and let them own their responsibilities. With the empowerment, team is in a better position to learn from their struggles. So here are the 5 reasons why you need to let your team struggle today

#1. Development of second rung leadership - In the face of adversity would emerge your next leaders, who emerge stronger and smarter.

#2. Revaluation of team goals - provides an opportunity to reevaluate team goals and align them as needed. 

#3. Reassessment of team skills - provides an opportunity to reassess skills needed by the team to perform more efficiently. 

#4. Opportunity of change - provides an opportunity to change for the good whether its letting go someone or changing the work culture. 

#5. Better team dynamics - provides an opportunity (provided handled properly) to increase the team dynamics as the team struggles together and emergencies victorious. 

If God allowed us to go through our life without any obstacles, it would cripple us. We would not be as strong as what we could have been. And we could never fly.

Previous posts you might be interested in

• Empower Your Team To Own Responsibilities
• Trust Your Team But Make Sure To Verify
• Is there a rope holding you in managing

5 Reasons To Let Your Team Struggle Today was originally published in LinkedIn

Only If You Knew How Much You Actually Know

#SridharPeddisetty #Leadership #Management #Motivational #Inspirational #ProductiveTeams #KnowledgeManagement  

Lew Platt, former CEO of HP famously said "If HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more profitable"

With all our experience encountering numerous situations, we tend to gain wisdom over a period of time and keep storing all the information in our subconsciousness. We are operating in a world where change is the only constant factor so its always important to keep learning but we do find ourselves struggling to come out of our comfort zone. Struggle is mainly because of the fear of unknown and sense of insecurity in facing failure. If we learn lessons from the success stories around us, one common factor would be the ability of successful people coming out of their comfort zone and using the power of their subconscious mind that actually guides them in correlating what they already know and using that knowledge to challenge their status quo. 

When in doubt venturing into the world of unknown, always listen to your intuition, which is a way your mind warns you to dangers or opportunities because your conscious mind has all the information. In our professional life we learn so many things on a daily basis but tend not to correlate the information for our future success. Working as a consultant helping various sized Organizations whether transforming their delivery groups to successfully adapt Agile practices or their operations groups to adapt ITIL processes or just bring in process improvements at an Org level to help achieve strategic objectives, I always attribute my success to bring in the transformation to the ability of correlating the information that already exists in the Organizations but because of silos, the information is not shared to its potential. 

Mantra for your success is your ability to understand the potential of the wisdom you have gained by correlating the knowledge gained in all your experience and using that wisdom to come out of your comfort zone and challenge the status quo. Personally I benefit by using productive tools like EverNote and MindNode, which helps me organize the information that I learn on a daily basis and then correlating the information for future success. 

Those people who develop the ability to continuously acquire new and better forms of knowledge that they can apply to their work and to their lives will be be the movers and shakers in our society for the indefinite future - Brian Tracy 

Only if you knew how much you actually know was originally published in LinkedIn