“Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.”
As a leader your success is not judged only on your own output and results, but on the productivity and performance of the people you manage.
Empowering staff is an essential part of a manager’s job and assist them to reach their potential is an aspiration any manager should have. It’s also important to remember how tricky management can be because it requires dealing with different types of people and they all have their own personalities, goals, behaviours and motivations. This means there’s no single solution when it comes to managing a team.
There are several effective approaches that managers can adopt to support their staff, help them be productive and achieve their potential:
- Using authority positively– by doing this can help your team reach its full potential by having established and well communicated expectations
- Good communication skills– the importance of clear communication cannot be underestimated when leading a team. It needs to be clear, concise, and presented in an honest and genuine way. Having regular 121’s and effective team meetings is a good way to maintain continuous and open communication and provides employees with an opportunity to discuss anything that’s on their mind
- Turn failure into an opportunity to learn– not fearing failure is the key to success and taking risks is essential in driving a business forwards
- Commend effort– praise and feedback can be really important to team members; it can help boost morale and confidence and everyone likes to know they are doing a great job!
- Develop existing strengths– sometimes the focus can purely be to improve on your weaker areas, its also essential to identify strengths to develop further
- Maintain an open environment– a key aspect of good management is being available and accessible to your team where they can approach you with any problems or concerns they may have
- Develop yourself and your team– make sure your team knows what they need in order to progress within the company or their careers. As a manager you could run a performance gap analysis to find out what training needs you may have. It is also important to evolve and develop yourself and your management abilities and style.
If you would like to talk to one of our HR consultants on the best way to lead and develop your team we have some solutions! Get in touch to turn your team into a high performing, winning team!