Forging a successful team is not something that just happens – it requires an investment of time, effort and energy to drive success. Spending the time to effectively build, grow and motivate your team pays dividends, not only in results, but also in establishing clear methods and career paths for employees to look forward to and advance toward. Here are some tips on building your team and driving your organization’s success.
Establish and Build
A vital part of building your team is knowing your team, which is why it’s imperative that you develop a relationship with every person on your team to help drive their success. Every person has different motivations – some people are driven by money, some are driven by success and recognition, and others are happiest when given clear direction and a concrete end goal. Talking with your team members and learning what motivates them can help you later on in your planning.
You can also learn a great deal about a person’s strengths and weaknesses through relationship building. As you work more and more with your team members, you can start to see patterns emerge and identify areas that they may need coaching or assistance with to reach their peak performance. The Huffington Post recommended in a recent article that you try to include team members in the decision-making process whenever possible. By seeing what solutions they offer and what their course of action is, you can discover what aspects of analyzing and approaching a decision works well and where they can be given more training or support to further their skills – and their success.
Foster and Grow
As part of the process, you will also start to see the creativity and outside-the-box thinking that your employees can bring to the table. You may well have a person on your staff right now who has an innovative and creative solution for a problem within your company, but has never felt confident enough to propose his or her idea or perhaps needs help to flesh it out into a fully actionable plan. By developing your relationships, you can start to get comfortable with your employees and break down some of the traditional barriers between leadership and floor employees that can make people uneasy.
As you start to open yourself more with your team, you also start to build your internal company culture. Are you open and accepting, willing to sit and listen to an idea whenever inspiration strikes or are you adherent to your mission statements and rules, only available for planned sitdowns and structured conversations? The goal is your company’s success and happy customers, and building an accommodating culture around that end point has to include your team. Finding what works best and driving growth of your company’s culture around that can only come from understanding and building the team. For more, Help Scout offers 20 great ideas for building both your company’s culture and your team.
Upward Drive
Lastly, working on developing relationships and building your team can also give you insights for who the key players are and how they might be well suited for work in other positions within your organization. People who have great ideas, work smartly and effectively and help better the knowledge and skills of their peers are often some of the best people to move into roles with more responsibility. Work to discover these people and their talents within your team, and you can begin to establish not only a coherent plan for advancement and promotion, but a strategy to build up others to step into vacated positions in turn – an overarching succession plan.
Your team will also see their peers being promoted, driving them to emulate and adopt some of the same skills and traits that prompted you to select a candidate for advancement. This can help provide motivation and purpose for those employees who are looking to build their career and grow with your organization, which is great news for your retention and for your business. Plus, with others on board with the same successful skills and constantly working to shine and excel, your measurable performance metrics are bound to go up. As they say, a rising tide lifts all boats!
At CSS, we have an extensive pool of candidates with vetted backgrounds and a motivation to succeed in their next career. Find the perfect new person to join your team or let us help you find your next career. Contact CSS today and find out more about how we can help you.