Do you want to reduce costly turnover?
Would you like your business to operate with fewer errors and interruptions to the flow of operations?
Are you interested in greater efficiency and productivity?
If you want your experience as a business owner to be more enjoyable and rewarding — and your company increasingly successful — you must build and maintain a dynamic and powerful team. You must put motivated and skilled individuals with positive attitudes in place and then help them realize more of their tremendous potential.
Step #1:
The first step and most effective way to build a competent, motivated, and engaged team is to hire intelligently. The typical path to hiring people, however, is filled with biased or incorrect information and involves guesswork and assumptions.
How can any business 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 rises 30 percent, and retention goes up 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:
The second step of building and maintaining a powerful team requires 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 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 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. That in turn leads to 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 continual 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-worth, self-confidence, and self-esteem in team members and also undermine the culture and credibility of leadership with the team.
Empowering owners, managers, and team members to become top performers solves many of the common problems that arise in business. As each team member develops 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?
If you find yourself at a loss for how to do this, explore your options and choose a coach or consultant best suited for you. There’s strength in engaging and using quality professional help. By doing so, you’ll not only sidestep costly and time-consuming problems, 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, consistently offer quality professional development opportunities and well-deserved recognition.
Work with your people to become top performers, and your well-chosen team will help you reach new heights in your business operations.
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This article was written for and published in collaboration with The Business Times newspaper. Access the article here.
