TRANSCRIPT

Leaders Journal EP04: The Way to Position Your People Well

INTRODUCTION:
Hello everyone, I am Coach Jason Ho. Welcome once again, to another episode of the Leaders Journal.

I started the Leaders Journal as a source for MNC leaders, directors and SME business owners to discover practical leadership stories and coaching insights.

For all the leaders out there, I have two questions for you.

Are your people burnt out? Or are your people leaving you?

Stay with me as I share some insights on what you can do to deal with that.

I believe the key lies in one of the 4Ds — Deployment.

(00:53) RECAP:
As always, I begin with a brief recap of what I’ve covered so far — what Perfect Performance is, how it came to be — and how leaders can get great relationships and great results with their teams through the 4Ds: Dominance, Deployment, Development and Directness.

I unpack these 4Ds using the garden analogy — and the principles from this analogy have personally become the anchor of my leadership journey.

There are 3 stakeholders in this analogy: the garden, the plants and the gardener.

For anyone hearing this for the first time, the garden represents your team’s culture; the plants represent your people; and the gardener represents you, as the leader.

(01:44) OWNERSHIP MINDSET:
And the whole idea behind the garden analogy, is this concept of an ownership mindset.

This leads to the tenet we covered in Episode 2 that says — everything starts with me.

When a leader embraces an ownership mindset, this essentially means that they are committed to their team’s Development by understanding the Dominance, or the strengths, of their people.

That leads to the next tenet that is — everyone grows differently.

The goal that every leader should work towards, should then be to understand how your people are wired and how they grow.

In other words, understanding what they are naturally good at and the things they feel energised doing.

Only then, can you deploy your people in positions, and delegate job tasks where they naturally thrive in.

(02:42) THE PRIMITIVE APPROACH TO DEPLOYMENT:
The problem I’ve seen with the majority of leaders that I work with, is that they have a very primitive way of Deployment.

What this looks like, is that they deploy their people solely based on competency and experience.

So as long as someone has a track record of doing something before, that ticks the checkbox of experience.

And if someone does a particular job really well, that ticks the checkbox of competency.

That is the norm.

Many leaders believe that as long as someone is good at something, that means they must enjoy doing it.

Right? WRONG.

This is a dangerous trap that leaders fall into here.

Many have the misconception that if someone in their team is competent at a task, they definitely are energised when doing it.

This could not be further from the truth.

The truth is, people can be good at something and not enjoy it.

And if they continue to be stuck in a job where they are doing what they are good at, but not what they are energised by, they would experience zero job fulfillment and end up just tolerating what they do.

Let me give an example.

I was coaching this leader who was extremely confused by a high-performing employee who quit out of the blue.

What happened was that the leader tasked this team member to spearhead client pitches and presentations.

Because this team member was so competent in that, the leader confidently began to delegate more pitches and presentations to him.

What the leader failed to realise was that giving client pitches and presentations drained this team member to no end, even though it was something he excelled in.

And over the months, this built up to the point where he got so burnt out and so fed up, he quit!

Going back to the Primal Greatness model in our previous episode.

It helps individuals break down job-specific tasks according to their level of competency and more importantly, according to what energises or drains them.

We can see that what this team member was assigned to do actually fell under his Hollow Endeavour.

So we now have an understanding, why he had such a high level of competency in it, but yet his burnout was inevitable, because all that he did was something that drained him.

With this understanding, how can we approach Deployment differently?

And what would it look like if we are able to position every member of our team to be able to operate primarily in the area of Primal Greatness, where they get to do what they do best at work every day?

(05:49) DEPLOYMENT VIA STRENGTHS-BASED PARTNERSHIPS:
Traditional Deployment is where leaders assign their team members job tasks that are specific to their JD — their job description or their job role.

But in the future of work, there is a need to redefine our approach towards Deployment, and view it as something that is beyond a job description.

Instead of confining people to perform roles only within their job scope, leaders should tap on strengths-based partnerships, to leverage the greatest strengths of those in their team, to perform the tasks that they feel most energised by.

By doing this, you might find that your team gets more done, and they might do it more effortlessly than before.

In my coaching with leaders, I give this example where we look at working on a project as a team, in the lens of carrying multiple boulders in a race towards the finishing line.

The “boulders” represent the different job tasks involved in order to see this project through to completion.

One person might be struggling under the weight of their boulder.

But the interesting thing is, when they hand that boulder to someone else, it magically becomes a pebble.

And that load is significantly lighter.

I call this the boulder-pebble analogy — where what is considered a boulder to one person might only feel like a pebble to another.

Similarly, a job task that is draining and burdensome to one person might feel effortless and energising to another.

That is the power of strengths-based partnerships in a team.

And our role as leaders is not to force our people to stick to the job tasks within their job description no matter what.

Our role as leaders is to identify what are the tasks that feel like boulders or pebbles to each individual in our team, and redeploy the specific tasks accordingly.

The job still gets done.

The level of excellence stays the same, or more often than not, it might be a notch higher.

And the morale and engagement level of your team will thrive.

In reality, this is a process of trial and error.

Sometimes, those in your team need to have a taste of what that job task is like before having a sense of whether they are competent in it, or whether they are truly energised when doing it.

But the key idea is this, you as the leader still must provide that opportunity.

(08:34) CLOSING:
A great leader always adopts the mentality of a coach — where you are always thinking about your people and what it means to develop them individually.

The future of work is one where the walls between job roles are lowered, and one that builds greater team synergy through leveraging strengths-based partnerships.

If you’d like to find out how you can redefine Deployment for your team — go to perfectperformance.org/leadersofinfluence — the link is in the description below.

Till then, this is Coach Jason Ho. Let’s bring out the best in our teams.

(key words: leadership, leadershiptips, strengthsbasedpartnership, teamwork, deployment)