Asking the right question
When thinking about how to best maximize your team members in these incredibly challenging times, you can ask yourself about each person’s strengths and weaknesses. Also ensure you answer the question “How do each of my direct reports recover from their mistakes?”
Folks on your leadership team (including yourself) are going to make mistakes. No big deal. It is expected. The issue is not the mistake itself. Rather, the crux of the matter is how a person recoups. And based on the Simpson Group’s decades of investigation into both the psychological results and actual performance of many hundreds of senior managers and executives, people who possess the following characteristics recover the fastest when an error is made and perform the best in general.
· decisiveness without concern for perfection.
· adaptability in the face of ambiguity.
· follow through on realistic commitments and reliability
· engagement with all concerned without avoiding conflict
· when required, they move quickly to upgrade their teams
Characteristics such as being popular or needing to be liked do not show up on the list. Loyalty does not make the list either. In fact, all of these latter characteristics have proven to be poor predictors of success. However, the five bullet points above are critical to those individual team members who recover as quickly as possible from their miscalculations and have elevated levels of long-term performance.
