Deliberate, intentional encouragement and building team spirit. One of the most impactful meetings that I ever attended was while working in Texas. We had a district managers meeting in Dallas about three or four months after we had a new regional vice president assigned to us.

We all had our coffee and donuts and a short time of fellowship before the meeting. When the new vice president began the meeting, he pulled out a yellow legal pad, looked it over intently and began the meeting. He welcomed everyone and then he did something out of the ordinary: one by one, to each person in the meeting, he told us one thing about ourselves that impressed him. There were about 15 of us in the meeting and he started with the person to his left, looked at the person and said, “Here is what I appreciate about you”. And then he went from person to person, looked directly at them and told them what he appreciated about him.

The meeting lasted about 6 hours and this part of the meeting took over an hour. But it was the most important hour of the meeting. Needless to say, it was the topic of conversation on each break and at lunch. I was so impressed by this I started to do it. However, I was always anxious about doing this because to do it legitimately was time consuming and I always had a full agenda for each meeting.

But, even though this vice president was just as busy as I, he did it at almost every meeting and it was one of the most impactful ways of building a team I had ever witnessed.

He built trust, loyalty and commitment from all of us. I am asking you to try this immediately after the holidays and let us know what happened.