There is a very significant difference between an organization where people come to work for the paychecks and an organization where your team goes well beyond the bare minimum and wants to become a part of a well-oiled machine that is performing at a very high level, winning consistently. Today we will begin a series of Management and Leadership lessons that virtually anyone can implement to get yourself on the road to creating a high performance team instead of a team that just goes through the motions. Trust me, you will feel a difference in just a few days or weeks. Furthermore, your employee associates will feel the difference just like you will. Interested? Read on…
It’s About Connections – At some companies, mediocre managers busy themselves with supervising their teams and enforcing order. At companies like this when a new associate joins the team, the manager assigns some underling to train in the new rookie with a training program that hasn’t been updated in many moons, possibly with absolutely no oversight from the manager. As you might expect, the outcome of such an endeavor is surely not going to inspire the new employee associate to have a profound understanding of what success looks like in their new role, sadly. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the new employee will not typically be able to connect themselves and their contribution with the larger Mission of the Team, the Department or the Company. Don’t be satisfied with a perfunctory onboarding of your valuable new hires. Don’t just show them how to perform their assigned duties and leave it at that. Go further, and help to make their work product relevant to them, by connecting them with their teammates, with the culture of the team, and with a clear understanding of how their work will help the team to deliver the results that define success. Empower every new member of your team by investing time with them upfront while they are new and impressionable. You can do this by discussing your expectations of them, and showing how they start small and simple and become more challenging as their skill, confidence and impact grow in scale. Connect your new associates to their teammates and to yourself as their leader. Make certain that they feel like they belong and see themselves as fitting into your existing culture of growth and learning. Let them know that you are there to help them to solve problems and to remove obstacles from their path and that you will be teaching them how to join you in solving problems and removing obstacles for the team along the way.
Invest In Developing Your Team – Your new and existing employee associates are funny creatures. They want today to be better than yesterday, and for tomorrow to be better than today. As long as that is going on, and as long as they feel like you are invested in developing them so that they will be better tomorrow than they are today, they will experience hope in a better future for themselves and their family. Don’t be anything less than absolutely clear with your direct reports, and make sure that you let them know that you see them as someone that is worthy of the investment of your precious time. When you lead your employee associates by helping them to develop and stretch to accomplish ambitious goals that they’ve never accomplished before, they will want to reward your investment with great consistent performance at a high level. You can coach them, you can train them, you can encourage your more experienced associates to also invest in training and developing them, and equipping them for success. You could even go so far as to invest in providing your aspiring new employee associates with a mentor from the current team or an outside development coach. Imagine what that would do for a new associate’s motivation and enthusiasm about their new role with your company. Your people want to do their best work, and it’s your duty and your responsibility to help them to master the best way to do their job by showing them how the best do it, and letting them mimic what they see you and your most experienced teammates doing. Make sure the examples that you’re showing them really connect with them and with results and the acknowledgment for a job well done, and set their expectation that great work is often rewarded with recognition and perks. Most importantly, be confident as you and your most experienced team members show the newbies the ropes. Your stellar and consistent self-confidence will spread with the new team members, and before long they will be the ones coaching and training the next batch of new associates.
These are just a couple of ideas that you can employ as a Manager to ensure that you are able to begin building positive momentum toward a high-performance team with a self-regulating growth and learning culture. When everyone knows what is expected of them at work, and they understand how what they do corresponds to what everyone else is doing, and they see you making generous investments in their development, they will willingly invest in trying to do their best work for you. Keep your eyes peeled for another 5 lessons in how to take powerful, positive steps toward building a great culture with your team, that leads to consistent predictable success and very committed employee engagement!
Michael Beach is an Executive Development Coach and a Business Advisor who consults with fast-growth companies all over the United States and helps them to create winning cultures where the company can win in the field of commerce and grow profitably. Michael and his team of coaches develop the leadership and management skills of Emerging Leaders all over the country, working on 15 critical areas of business acumen, like Leadership, Communication, Emotional Intelligence, Management, Decision Making, and many more. Michael and his team just launched a podcast on Leadership Development, the “What Are You Doing?” podcast. Check out the Michael Beach Coaching & Consulting Youtube channel and consider subscribing to the channel or to the podcast. They are both free and very valuable sources of great ideas for growing business professionals. Enjoy!
