"Um, that's not my job. Somebody else is going to do it." Have you ever heard that? Welcome back to the Confidence at Work Series. If you need to catch up, here are part ONE & TWO. I have created this series to answer most of my audit's questions, the one I use when I work with organizations. Whether I do one-on-one work with individuals, with team members, with VPs or with managers, I strive to make sure that everybody is performing at their best. Today is about improving initiative. Keep reading or watch the video for more...

Employees waiting for somebody else to do it or sending the ball to someone else happens quite a bit. Let's go over four different ways to improve initiative in your team.

When we feel micromanaged, we are not at our best, and we feel like nobody trusts us. We aren't really resourceful, because we feel like any ideas that we could have will be shut down anyway. If every single time you have an idea, someone responds with a "better" one, you will just stop having ideas altogether, right? You'll probably feel insecure when it comes to it, and then it will turn into: "Not my job, somebody else is going to do it."

If you're in a leading position in an organization and this sentence rings a bell, this tip is potentially for you. Make sure that you are not micromanaging your team and you trust them. Trust is the number one, most important thing.

Feeling criticized is a bit different than feeling micromanaged. Being criticized is not about somebody telling you how to do your job. It's about getting told your job is not well done. Having a way to provide feedback in a nice way will affect somebody's confidence.

Usually, critical people have something else going on in their life. People don't wake up in the morning and say: "Oh, I think I should be negative today and make everybody else's life miserable." It's because they're going through something. And if they're going through something in their personal life, that's where I come in and I make sure that we fix that, so that they become a bit nicer with everybody else around. But when you're going through something, it's not easy to be a nice coworker or a nice team member.

When you are working for an organization or you are starting your own business, you have to know why you're doing it. It's usually not just for the paycheque. Very often, you want to feel like you're helping people. Maybe you want a flexible schedule. Maybe you want to be able to work from home. Maybe you like working in a certain environment. Maybe you want to feel like you're making a difference. You want to use your skills. You want people to recognize your work. Remembering the reason why you are doing your job will give you a lot of confidence when you're facing little challenges, when you are facing a change.

Whenever you feel like saying: "Oh, I don't know what to do with this, so I'm just going to give it to somebody else and pass the ball to somebody else because this is unknown.", ask yourself: "Why am I here? I want to make a difference. By passing the ball to somebody else, I'm not making a big difference here." Or if you are there for the salary, because sometimes it's part of it, right? Ask yourself: "Am I going to get a raise? Am I going to continue to get paid and still be on the payroll if I constantly give my job to somebody else?"

Know why you are there and you will be driven by your purpose. Why are you doing what you're doing?

Find any opportunity to communicate better and work as a team by sharing tasks. Enhance your communication skills. Make sure that you are clear, that you're effective, and that you can give AND take directions well. The better you are at communicating, the better you know the other team members. By recognizing the differences in people around you and by using different kinds of languages when you talk to other people, you help make sure that everybody's working as a team instead of passing the ball to others.

Next time, we're going to talk about decreasing confidence. What? Yes, you read that right! That actually comes up quite a bit when corporations fill out my audit. They say: "Well, some of my team members are too confident. How do you work with that? They're actually quite arrogant, they don't accept any feedback and they think that they know it all." More about this next week...

Stay tuned!

PASSING THE BALL TO SOMEONE ELSE IS EASY.

Improving initiative starts by eliminating procrastination.

Download your Copy of my 6 Strategies to Stop Procrastinating and exit the loop. These tips to make you find your focus (and keep it!) will help you get back into action.

Check out some of my previous blog posts...