Care for Your Team

Why caring can boost performance

There is a lot to be said about caring for your team – the research paints a clear picture – so why is it so hard to do?

"We care" sounds like the sort of cheesy thing a hard-nosed executive might say to their employees but, behind their backs, plan for their jobs to be cut to save money and boost the bottom line. But the evidence is compelling that actually caring for your team is critical to team performance – in fact in teams particularly, care and caring are powerful drivers of performance.

So, what is the evidence?

Well, there are a number of lines of evidence some direct and some indirect. I reported in 2021 on a number of studies which give direct evidence for caring in some shape or form. We should, however, define caring and this is more difficult than we may assume, though we intuitively may feel somebody cares. So, what does caring for your team members mean:

• You care about their health and mental health

• You respect them and their abilities

• You help them develop

• You value them as people and employees

And the above are defined by emotional engagement with them and being emotionally involved in their progress and performance. You can’t care without emotional involvement. So back to the research and there was one particularly interesting study in 2021. It was interesting because it was a real-world study documenting the performance of 48 teams from 5 Canadian startups. And what were the results?