How To Radically Strengthen Your Team By Allowing Them To Struggle

When I was younger, I thought I must have all the answers for my team.

When someone brought me a challenge, I’d rise to the occasion like a royal knight to save the day. But over time, that backfired.

My team grew accustomed to me making all the decisions, so they began to come to me for everything. And why shouldn’t they? I was the go-to source for everything.

That all ended when I decided to rarely advise my team until I heard what the other person was thinking.

Your team should be given some space to struggle, especially in lower-risk situations.

Struggle strengthens your team’s capabilities and allows them to learn at a deeper level.

It’s called The Disfluency Effect, which “is the process of making items to be learned more difficult to process which means that the student, in using more processing, processes the material to a deeper level.”

My sales team experiences this daily.

There’s some industry or procedural “thing” that they haven’t encountered before, so it stretches them mentally. But in the end, they learn an important lesson that will stay with them throughout their sales career at…