Wind In My Hair
SNAPS DAY 333
11/29/20222 min read
Give your Associates and leaders the freedom to be curious, make mistakes, and experiment new things out-of-the box to achieve the organization’s purpose. When you empower your Team, they develop a sense of freedom because they know their leader trusts them and got their back. When this is dove-tailed with accountability, this results to leadership maturity. If you look closer, when your Associates are empowered and free is also when you yourself become free.
It was almost summer when I was tasked to manage an Account of close to a hundred engineers supporting a hi-tech networking organization. I was told that past Operations Directors were not able to penetrate this very exclusive Team because “if you are not one of them, they won’t listen to you”. The past directors applied authoritarian leadership styles to get the engineers to follow their directives but somehow still failed. I remember the first leadership meeting I held was attended by just 1 out of the 9 Managers in that account because they said they were busy doing important things versus attending my meeting. Meanwhile, the account was on its last contract year with average performance. Clearly, they key to success was to gain the engineers’ trust.
On my second month in the account, I announced I have doubled the Team Building budget so I can bring the entire account to a beautiful resort near-by which has a fancy wave pool. I also announced every individual engineer and every officer whose Team passed their metrics in the last 3 months are given an extra ticket to bring one (1) loved-one. I told them, I could have brought everyone only if the entire account passed the metrics. Two days later, all the managers of this account came to me and had a lengthy proposal that since my budget is double, we should give an extra ticket to everyone and that they commit that the metrics will be met the following quarter. To their surprise, I approved what they proposed. I even added a second extra ticket to all top performers for the last 12 months, and to all officers. During the actual Summer Team Building, I spent quality time talking to all the loved-ones of my managers and engineers. My daughter, Tres who was 6 years old at that time, sung the song “Hawak Kamay” (Hold hands) which was an inspiring song about resilience and grit of a Team.
