Marcus Straub
If you want your experience as a business owner to be more enjoyable and rewarding — and your company to be increasingly successful — it’s imperative you consistently work toward building and maintaining a dynamic and powerful team.
Do you want to derive more joy from owning and running your business? Are you interested in greater efficiency and productivity? Would you like your business to operate with fewer errors and less interruptions to the flow of operations? Do you want your business to be more successful overall?
These are accomplished by first putting motivated and skilled individuals with positive attitudes in place and then assisting them to tap more of their tremendous potential on a consistent basis.
The easiest and most effective way to build a powerful team is to hire intelligently. Unfortunately, the typical path to hiring people is filled with biased or incorrect information and involves quite a bit of guesswork and assumptions. How can any business successfully assemble a team of skilled, solution-oriented and motivated people without the reliable data needed to do so?
This is where job benchmarking and candidate assessments come in. When this approach is used correctly, productivity rises an astonishing 30 percent and retention goes up a welcome 50 percent. Productivity rises because a team member’s behaviors, core values and competencies align with the duties, responsibilities and rewards of the job. Retention increases because there’s symmetry among the new hire, job and company values.
The second component of building and maintaining a powerful team requires that you provide professional development opportunities to your team. This is best accomplished with the help of a trained professional who will work with you, your managers and team members to develop top performers. The objective here is to help everyone become empowered players so they, your clients and your business will experience greater levels of happiness and success.
Conversely, one of the surest ways to damage a business from within is to tear down or undermine solid team members and their efforts. This comes about through unconstructive criticism, blame, lack of follow through, ineffective communication and simply not appreciating those individuals who make up the company. These behaviors undermine self-worth, self-confidence and self-esteem in team members and also undermine the credibility of leadership with the team.
People thrive when praised for a job well-done. Recognizing team members’ solid efforts and working with them in positive and constructive ways to continue reaching for higher levels of excellence offers the most effective way to build self-esteem and confidence, which in turn results in higher levels of performance.
Consider what Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, had to say: “Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish.”
Empowering owners, then managers and finally each team member to become top performers is a powerful solution to many of the ills experienced in business. As each team member develops his or her unique skills, the business runs much more efficiently and effectively, the work atmosphere grows more positive, turnover goes down, attendance goes up, client satisfaction increases and the bottom line improves.
Does this sound like the type of business you want to own?
If you find yourself at a loss for how to do this — or in need of assistance yourself — explore your options and choose the coach or consultant best suited for you. There’s strength in engaging and using quality help. By doing so, you provide a powerful example for your team members to follow.
Even with the best information and training available, there’s no guarantee a team member will work out in the long run. Circumstances change in business and in the lives of the people who make up the business. As circumstances and people change, remain aware of corporate culture and performance, retaining and supporting those individuals who truly want to contribute to the happiness and success of everyone involved.
You have the wonderful opportunity to help your team members find and develop their strengths and to come alive as active and engaged players in your business. Bring in a qualified professional coach or consultant, hire effectively, offer professional development opportunities and work with your people to become top performers and your well-chosen team will follow you to new heights in your business operations.
