Written by Roxana Radulescu, Leadership & Team Coach
Roxana is the founder of All Personal, a Canadian award-winning leadership and team coaching & training company helping corporate team leaders and start-up co-founders boost leadership skills to become dream ‘bosses’ and build dream teams.
The workplace as we know it has changed dramatically and is changing by the hour. Try as we might, no one holds the recipe for creating the perfect workplace that can face any kind of future crisis. We’re back to trial and error, and we're creating the future of work as we speak.
We've all seen changes that were unthinkable before, such as almost everyone working virtually from home and companies leading almost all their projects remotely.
We're in the process of creating the 'new,' not the 'new normal,' just the 'new'
How we create this 'new' is going to affect how we live our lives for the foreseeable future.
The displays of creativity, flexibility, empathy, and collaboration have been fantastic! We're re-discovering and re-building these skills and muscles to get stronger and better and make the best impact we can make together!
Introverts or extroverts, humanists or realists, we can all make a game-changing impact! And this is crucial for the times we live in when the game is changing as we speak!
I'm privileged to be working with super-leaders and teams who get together, all hands on deck, to re-create their future as individuals, as a team and as an organization!
I also need to confess I use various quizzes, tests, and assessment tools that help individuals and teams understand where they are now, how they are different, and how to use this to their benefit so they set a clear direction and achieve their goals. I think that’s one caveat and also the advantage of people in Learning & Development, and once an L&D, always an L&D, we do like the science and the data behind it!
When I was heading the Learning & Development department of an international law firm, I was looking for a tool that allowed us to understand (and apply) ways in which our people had their best business impact in the organization.
Not personality-wise but business-wise, so that we can innovate, plan, strategize, prioritize, and move forward based on clear data. To me, as an L&D professional, that was the best kind of Return on Investment I could have imagined, as it would be immediately applicable in the business.
I found The Game-Changing Index® now, in my coach and consultant role, and this is exactly the reason why I like using this tool with the teams and organizations I work with: it provides a language and framework to help people communicate with each other in a meaningful way, by aligning everyone to the collective impact required to achieve a common objective.
Pascal Vignier, Inspector General at Orange, shares his thoughts around this tool:
‘It quickly enabled us to understand and communicate how each member of our team could best contribute and make an impact in the process of transformational change.’
In these times of crisis, uncertainty, anxiety, stress and frustration, it becomes even more important for organizations to tap into the business growth potential of their people.
A game-changing lesson
One of the lessons that I have seen and learned and which I would like to share with you here is that of a game-changing leader of a large division within a big technology business.
His GC Index® profile was that of a high Polisher/Implementer.
From the outset, the leader identified his key business priorities as:
Protecting margins
Engaging staff during this time
Identifying new revenue models
While he recognized he had to do things differently, when he was under pressure, he kept reverting to what he knew best and investing more time and energy in doing this, risking both burnout for himself and his team.
The leader needed to understand:
How to do things differently
Who is on the team to support
What new products/services to invest in
The leader had struggled with these questions, particularly as a Polisher / Implementer. He found it difficult to explore different things because he was so focused on ‘doing’ and making what the business was currently doing ‘better.’
As a Polisher/Implementer, his natural focus was to protect existing revenue, and he struggled to look for new opportunities.
The GC Index® framework and language helped him recognize his strengths, identify where he needed support, and create an action plan.
Call for action
By bringing the conversation back to the business challenges, the leader identified the need to focus his attention on the Product Innovation and Sales Team, in a bid to identify new opportunities.
He decided to use The GC Index® to ensure he had the right people in these teams to do this.
He also wanted to understand where the Game Changers and Strategists were across his wider division, to help identify new opportunities and possibilities.
As a Polisher/Implementer, our leader’s response to the crisis was to march forward with the message ‘everything is urgent and everything is important’, and, as a result, lots of staff were feeling burnt out.
By coming back to the business challenges, the leader identified the need to prioritize and engage divisions.
Knowing it was not a strength of his, the leader decided to use The GC Index® with the leadership team, to help identify the Strategists to bring focus and the Play Makers to help engage others.
The reason I wanted to share this story and highlight this tool is because the more aware we are of how we are different and how each of us can make our best impact as part of a team, to a common objective, the more we are able to feel engaged and included genuinely.
The more leaders are aware of these differences, the more they’ll be able to build teams that are self-motivated and where team members engage each other, leaders included in the ‘team members’ definition, not outside of it!
This is also how better business decisions are made, with everyone on the team contributing!
Self-reflection on business impact
I’m sharing some questions below to help you reflect on the business impact you and your team are having in your organization:
When, in your career, did you feel you made the best impact on your team or in your role?
Is it easy for you to come up with original ideas and imagine possibilities for transforming the future? (game-changers)
Are you energized by making plans, prioritizing, setting clear directions and connecting the dots? (strategists)
Do you find motivation from getting things done and implementing projects from start to finish? (implementers)
Are you excited to take an idea and develop it further to create a future you're proud of? (polishers)
Is it easy for you to spot talent, engage it in projects and help teams work together well? (play-makers)
Is everyone on your team able to make the best contribution they can make?
Are they in the right roles or do they have the right responsibilities so they feel engaged and included, and so they make the best business impact for the organization?
What kind of impact are you making, or feel you could be making, in your organization?
Now, more than ever, leadership is no longer about the leader who's lonely at the top.
It's about who on the team is able to take the 'helm' depending on what needs to be done, and who can do it best.
It’s about our capacity to recognize and work with the talent we have on our teams, to their full potential!
We need teams that change the game together! And this is only possible by bringing the teams and their leaders together, by creating a space where we can all share ideas, support each other, understand each other’s strengths and impact, and create a strategy and plan for the future we want to be in.
No leader has been through this before. No team or organization has gone through a similar rollercoaster before, where health and work, as well as personal and business, are so interconnected and dependent on each other.
It’s time for all of us to learn how to lead and how to follow each other.
If you want to dive deeper into the art of modern leadership, here are more free resources for team managers:
The 5 Ways in Which YOU Are Making Your Best Impact in Your Team!
Book a complimentary 30-minute call to find out more about your business impact and how you make your best contribution to your team and organization.
Roxana Radulescu, Leadership & Team Coach
Roxana is the founder of All Personal, a Canadian award-winning leadership and team coaching & training company. Unlike other people leadership programs that focus on top executives, All Personal also works with mid-senior corporate leaders and start-up co-founders – and their teams! Roxana is a TEDx speaker, a certified Professional Coach – ACC with the International Coaching Federation, EIA with the European Mentoring & Coaching Council (EMCC), and Team Coach – ITCA with EMCC, Scaled OKRs coach and a certified GCologist®. She holds a diploma in Learning & Development and Human Resources practice from the Chartered Institute for Personnel & Development in the UK.
