If you want your experience as a business owner to be more enjoyable and rewarding — and your company increasingly successful — it’s imperative you consistently work toward building and maintaining a dynamic and empowered team.
This is accomplished by putting skilled and motivated individuals with positive attitudes in place and then helping them develop and use more of their potential on a regular basis.
- Are you interested in greater efficiency and productivity?
- Do you want to reduce costly turnover?
- Would you like your business to operate with fewer errors and interruptions to the flow of operations?
- Does deriving more joy from owning and running your business interest you?
The first and most effective step to build a competent, motivated and engaged team is to hire intelligently. Unfortunately, the typical path to hiring is filled with biased or incorrect information and involves guesswork. This path often leads to poor hires.
The job of successfully assembling a team of skilled, motivated and solution-oriented people is made far more difficult without the reliable data needed to do so. This is where accurate and proven candidate assessments come in. When this approach is used, productivity rises 30 percent and retention increases 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?
The second step of building and maintaining a powerful team requires you to provide professional development opportunities. 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 players so they, your clients and business experience more fulfillment, happiness and success. Do you provide team members with the professional development they need to be their best?
People thrive when praised for a job well done. Recognizing team members’ solid efforts and working with them in constructive ways to reach for higher levels of excellence builds self-esteem, competency and confidence. This results 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 step of building and maintaining a powerful team?
One of the surest ways to damage a business from within is to hire ineffectively, not support continued 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 make up the company. These behaviors undermine self-worth, self-confidence and self-esteem in team members and also undermine the culture of a 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 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?
You have the opportunity to help team members find and develop their strengths and come alive as engaged players in your business. Bring in a qualified professional coach or consultant, use candidate assessments, consistently offer quality professional development opportunities and well-deserved praise and recognition. Work with your people to become top performers, and your well-chosen team will help you to reach new heights in your business operations.
If you find yourself at a loss for how to do this, explore your options and choose a coach or consultant best suited to you and your business. There’s strength in engaging quality professional help. In doing so, you’ll sidestep costly and time-consuming pitfalls and provide a powerful example for team members to follow.
