- Are you interested in greater efficiency and productivity?
- Would you like to reduce costly turnover along with errors and interruptions?
- Do you want your operation to become more successful so you can derive more joy from owning and running a business?
If you want your experience as a business owner to be more enjoyable and rewarding — and your company to be more successful — it’s imperative you build and maintain a dynamic and empowered team. You must put motivated and skilled individuals with positive attitudes in place and then help them develop and realize more of their potential.
Step 1: Hire Intelligently
The first step and most effective way to build a competent, motivated, and engaged team is to hire intelligently. The typical path to hiring, however, is filled with biased or incorrect information and involves assumptions and guesswork. This often leads to poor hires. Assembling a team of skilled, solution-oriented and motivated people is far more difficult without the reliable data needed to do so.
This is where candidate assessments come in. When this approach is used, productivity rises by an astonishing 30 percent and retention goes up by 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.
How effective is your hiring process?
Step 2: Initiate Professional Development
The second component of building and maintaining a powerful team depends on professional development. Like the first step, this next one 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 so they, your clients, and your business will experience more happiness, fulfillment, and success.
Do you provide team members with the professional development they need to become their best?
People thrive when they’re praised for a job well done. Recognizing team members’ solid efforts and working with them in constructive ways to continue reaching for higher levels of excellence promotes self-esteem and competency. When people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish.
How are you doing with this third component of building and maintaining a powerful team?
What’s next?
One of the surest ways to damage a business from within is to hire ineffectively, neglect continued learning and growth, and undermine team members and their efforts. This last aspect 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-esteem and confidence and in turn the culture of the business and credibility of leadership.
Empowering owners, managers, and team members to become top performers offers an effective solution to many of the common problems experienced in business. As team members develop their unique skills, the business runs more efficiently and effectively, the 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 accomplish this, explore your options and choose the coach or consultant best suited for you. There’s strength in engaging and using quality professional help. In doing so, you’ll sidestep many common errors that are costly and time-consuming as well as provide a powerful example for your team members to follow.
You have a wonderful opportunity to help your team members find and develop their strengths and come alive as engaged players in your business. Bring in a qualified coach or consultant, use candidate assessments, and consistently offer quality development opportunities and well-deserved praise and recognition.
Work with your people to become top performers, and your well-chosen team will help you reach new heights in your business operations.
