Marcus Straub
If you want a more enjoyable and rewarding experience as a business owner — along with a more successful business — it’s imperative you consistently work toward building and maintaining a dynamic and powerful team.
Do you want to reduce costly turnover? Would you like your business to operate with fewer errors and less interruptions to the flow of operations? Are you interested in greater efficiency and productivity? All this is accomplished by putting motivated and skilled individuals with positive attitudes in place and then helping them tap more of their tremendous potential on a consistent basis.
The first step and most effective way to build a competent, motivated and engaged team is to hire intelligently. However, the typical methods to hiring people rely on biased or incorrect information and involve 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, productivity rise 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. Is your approach to hiring an effective one?
The second component of building and maintaining a powerful team requires 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 individual 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 more happiness and success. Do your team members receive the professional development they need to be their best?
People thrive when praised for a job well done. Recognizing a team member’s solid effort and working with them in positive and constructive ways to continue reaching for higher levels of excellence builds self-esteem, competency and confidence. This results in turn in greater levels of performance and job satisfaction. When people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish. How are you doing with this third aspect of building and maintaining a powerful team?
One of the surest ways to damage a business from within is to hire ineffectively, disregard learning and growth and undermine solid 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 work so hard to make the company successful. These behaviors undermine self-confidence and self-esteem in team members and also undermines the culture as well as the credibility of leadership
Empowering owners, managers and team members to become top performers offers an effective solution to many of the common problems in business. As each team member develops his or her unique skills, the business runs more efficiently and effectively, the work atmosphere grows more positive, turnover and absenteeism goes down, client satisfaction increases and the bottom line improves.
Does this sound like the type of business you want to own?
If you’re at a loss for how to proceed, explore your options and choose the coach or consultant best suited for you. There’s strength in enlisting quality professional help. In doing so, you’ll not only sidestep costly and time consuming errors, but also 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 to come alive as active and engaged players in your business. Bring in a qualified professional coach or consultant, use job benchmarking and consistently offer professional development opportunities and well-deserved praise and recognition. Work with your people to become top performers and your team will help you reach new heights in your business operations.
