Franziska: Hi and welcome back! Today, I want to quickly share a style of leadership with you that I wholeheartedly believe in, that I believe is one of the best ways to lead a team and to inspire your team, and that is the concept of bottom-up leadership.

So how I see it is that there are sort of two core styles of running a team. The first one is, of course, the top-down leadership style that a lot of people use and that is the leaders at the top will dictate everything that is happening in the team, in the culture, in the company. What I believe is a very effective way to grow a team and to build an amazing team environment. Of course, you know, lot of people ask us here at Basic Bananas, how do you have such an amazing team and how are they so initiative-drive? How do they take responsibilities? The reason why is we use the bottom-up leadership style.

What that means is that most of our initiatives, most of the things that happen here that are helping to build a culture are driven by the team. They are not my ideas. They are often ideas that the team come up with. So one thing that you can do to facilitate this bottom-up leadership style where the team is very involved in what we do here is to select a team happiness rock star.

You‘ve heard we talked about this in the past, I believe. We have one person here, Aga, who is very amazing at nurturing and looking after the team, and making sure everyone is happy. She‘s also the one that often drives team activities. For example, the latest thing we are doing right now is Friday Night, Movie Night where we eat pasta and watch some weirdo show that the team likes. I think it was OC or something. Also, we do daily meditations that someone else is running. Julia runs those. So a lot of the activities that we do are run by the team and even are ideas by the team. They are not dependent on you, the leader. I do believe that it‘s one of the best ways to keep your team engaged because they have a say in how they would love the business to be run and how they would love their culture to be built.

So I wanted to share this with you. It‘s maybe something you can also implement in your own business. The first thing you could do is find someone in your team who wants to drive these programs, who wants to be in charge. Then, get everybody‘s input, get everybody to come up with their ideas. So we do a lot of things here other than what I mentioned. We go on hikes together. We also have sort of flexible work time. Some people sometimes decide to work from overseas if they have families overseas. It‘s all initiative-driven by your team members.

I hope you enjoy this tip and I would love to see more companies actually do that, I would love to see more companies involve their teams in the decision making of the well-being of the team.

If you enjoy this tip, feel free to share it with anyone who runs a business, who you believe would benefit from this idea and hopefully, see you next time.