Motivate Your Team in English | Leadership Communication Skills at Work

How can you speak like a leader and effectively motivate your team in English?

This is a question I'm going to answer today in response to a comment I received

here on YouTube several months ago,

I did a lesson titled Positive Communication at Work and on Teams while

reviewing the comments on that lesson. I saw this question, "Annemarie,

could you please have more videos about teamwork and phrases

about employees working under you when you are their supervisor?"

Today's Confident English lesson will help you to successfully motivate your

team in English and develop a genuine leadership communication

style.

If you don't already know, I'm Annemarie with Speak Confident English,

everything I do here is designed to help you get the confidence you want for

your life and work in English.

One way I do that is with my weekly Confident English lessons,

where I share fluency and confidence, building strategies,

advanced level vocabulary,

and training on communication skills, just like in this lesson today.

So while you're here,

make sure that you subscribe to my Speak Confident English channel.

So you never miss one of my Confident English lessons.

Now let's dive right into your leadership communication style in English.

As you watch from start to finish,

you'll gain four effective strategies and 14 must have

phrases to help you motivate your team in English. Moreover,

you'll have clear example phrases that you can adapt as a team leader

in your English speaking environment. Let's get right to it with strategy.

Number one, for speaking like a leader and motivating your team in English,

make your team members part of the mission.

I want you to think for a moment how you feel when you know that the work

you do contributes to something bigger than yourself.

When you know that your work has impact,

it's a powerful feeling.

Isn't it understanding how your work contributes to the

vision or mission of a company is motivating.

And it leads to an overall sense of fulfillment. As a leader,

you can motivate your team members by helping them see how their work

contributes to the larger picture and how their work has impact.

In other words,

you can help connect the dots between your team members work

and how their work enables the team or the company to achieve its mission,

to connect the dots means to piece together and reveal information

that was previously unknown.

It's possible that your team members don't really know how their role has

impact or why it's important. And as a team leader,

you have an opportunity to help them see that there are two ways you can do

this. First.

You can tell your team members how their work contributes

using encouraging sentences.

And here are a few sentence starters you can use as an example,

your work is instrumental in your role and your work are crucial

to,

or your growth in a specific area or skill

has contributed considerably to the overall success of our team.

Now,

let me go one step further and give a couple of very specific examples on

how you might use those sentence starters. First,

your work has been instrumental in helping us expand our program and

meet the needs of hard to reach clients in rural areas.

And my second example, your role and your work,

we're crucial to helping our largest clients successfully navigate a

rebranding strategy.

The second way you can demonstrate your leadership skills and motivate your team

in English is to use effective questions that help your

team members to connect the dots themselves rather than use

simply telling someone that their role has impact.

There are questions you can use that help them discover that for

themselves. For example,

you might start with a question such as how would you describe the company's

mission in your own words and what excites you about it once your team

member has described the company's mission and shared why they're excited

about that mission, you can follow up with the next question.

Why do you think your role here is important and how does your work

contribute to that mission together with your team member?

You can begin to connect those dots and help your employees see

how their work has impact.

Our second strategy for motivating team members in English is to focus

on quality of work. Every team experiences,

challenges such as setbacks, missed deadlines and mistakes,

acknowledging the difficulties and struggles that were overcome to

attain goals can do several things.

It can help motivate your employees to continue growing in the right direction.

It can encourage others to learn from the experience that a team member had,

and it can make a team member feel truly seen or recognized

when using this strategy.

It's important to contrast the challenge or struggle with

the performance of your team or a team member. And once again,

here are several sentence starters you could use to help you do that. First.

I know that,

and then you might describe the challenge or struggle and follow it up with

you, did a great job with,

and then highlight what that team member or your team did a second option,

your efforts in. And then again,

the challenging situation helped us to,

and then you would describe the positive outcome and a third option.

I can't tell you how much X improved Y here X

would be a team member's performance and Y is the challenge

or struggle that was overcome.

Let's go over a specific example of how you could use one of those must

have phrases for motivation.

Imagine someone on your team invested significant personal time

and energy to help the team reach a deadline. When that happens,

you could say,

I know you invested a lot of time outside of working hours to meet

this deadline.

You did a great job of supporting the team in this challenging task and

motivating them as well. Alternatively,

if a team member's specific action directly led to an improvement,

you could say,

I can't tell you how much your innovative strategies have helped to improve

the overall performance of our entire team.

Well done our third strategy for how to effectively motivate team members

in English is to encourage displays of leadership among

your team.

When a team member demonstrates extraordinary communication skills or

leadership skills,

you can encourage your team members to strengthen those skills

to go further when you encourage them appropriately,

or when you encourage them in those efforts to do this

effectively,

consider highlighting a specific example of when one of your team members

demonstrated extraordinary communication skills or leadership skills

and share how it helped the team.

How did it contribute to overall progress or success?

Here are four sentence starters you could use to help you do that.

The way you handled X helped the team, too.

I appreciate that you took the initiative to your guidance in X,

helped the team two. And number four,

your innovative approach to X allowed the team. Two.

Once again,

let's look at a couple clear examples of how we can use those sentence starters.

First, imagine one of your team members was successful in helping calm

an irate or upset client to encourage your team member.

You might say the way you handled the client's complaint,

help the entire team learn the best way to respond to negative

feedback and to problem solve. Here's another example,

if a team member's extensive experience helped the team

to elevate their overall performance,

you could encourage them by saying your experience and guidance in

strategic rebranding,

motivated the team to think outside the box and refocus,

and now strategy number four for demonstrating leadership skills and

encouraging your team in English foster growth among your team,

nothing is more rewarding and motivating than having the

opportunity to grow one's skill sets,

recognizing a team member's specific skills and creating opportunities for

growth can help your team members have clarity,

feel seen and feel supported as well when you're

encouraging your team members in this way,

be sure to highlight their valuable skills and give them the

opportunity to take those skills further in doing this.

Here are four must have phrases you can use to help you.

Number one,

I value your ability to X and I'd love for you to spearhead.

And then describe an initiative that you want them to take leadership on.

And number two, your knowledge and experience an X are valuable.

Would you mind sharing your thoughts on number three?

The improvements to X were fantastic.

Could you share your process with the entire team in our next meeting and number

four, your X is promising and exciting.

Please let me know the best way I can support your continued growth

in this area. Once more,

let's take a couple of those sentence starters or those phrase builders and

use them in some specific examples.

Let's say that a team member shows real promise when it comes to a

specific skill or task on the team.

And you want to encourage this team member to continue focusing on

this skill and expanding it to do that.

You could say I value your ability to spot trends,

and I'd love for you to spearhead the new ad campaign. In that example,

not only are you recognizing a skill,

but you're creating the opportunity for that team member to grow.

In addition to that,

let's say this same team member takes that opportunity to grow

and continues to blow you away. They continue to demonstrate excellence.

As a result, you see this as a teachable moment for the entire team.

So to encourage this team member in the steps they have taken to grow

and to create an opportunity for your entire team to learn through this process

and grow as well.

You could say your improvements to the ad campaign were fantastic.

Could you share your process with the entire team in our next meeting

now that you have these four key strategies on how to motivate your team in

English and you have 14 essential phrases,

let's finish with three tips to help you continue demonstrating

your leadership skills in English, tip number one,

encourage team shoutouts. In other words,

foster a work culture of appreciation and encouragement,

not just from you as a team leader,

but among your team as well during your monthly or weekly team meetings,

you can encourage everyone to give a shout out or to encourage

another member of the team.

A team member could highlight how someone else helped them or even

encourage someone in outstanding performance.

A second tip is to introduce awards or rewards to

encourage or motivate members after outstanding performance.

You can provide things such as a day off a gift card,

or even a handwritten thank you card.

And that leads me to the third tip for how to demonstrate your leadership and

continue to motivate your team.

Say thank you more than anything saying thank you

to your team members for their hard work can be extremely motivating

and encouraging.

And the good news is there's no limit on how often you can say thank you.

The key to doing it successfully is to make sure that it's genuine and

specific. And with that,

you have the strategies and phrases you need to motivate your team

in English. If you found this lesson useful to you today,

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And I look forward to seeing you next time.