Developing Your People: Creating a Championship Team
May 18th, 2016 // 2:28 pm @ Scott Manning
I’ve given you a lot of material over the past few weeks to really go to work on your team from the inside out of your organization in order to develop winners. It all begins by letting them know you expect and believe them to be winners in the first place.
The greatest teams are driven by the desire to do well, by ownership and commitment to their own outcomes individually and together. I have always said, training wears off (and really so does everything else too, especially motivation).
Empowerment, on the other hand, can be nurtured and maintained if you have the right culture and everyone is fully invested in it and indoctrinated with a winning attitude. What we like to say – WHATEVER IT TAKES attitude that success is the only option, if your people truly believe that and they are armed with the tools and resources necessary – you will win and win big. Winning people are like muscles, you have to work them out to make them stronger.
I have 5 components of helping your people to be great and as the Army says ‘be the best they can be’…here they are for you to embrace, integrate, and profit from.
Motivation
Empowerment
Training
Accountability
Reward
I do not believe any one of them can be left out. I believe this is a system for great people to thrive and do well with, which requires each component. Of course, this is a simplistic approach for this week’s article. There is more to be said about each component – none the less most people, most businesses have none, at best maybe one…and it’s usually some meaningless, often theoretical training or robotic protocols instead of the reality that is lived everyday in the operations and execution of their responsibilities.
Important reminder: everything from the past few weeks builds and compounds with this, you have to have quality people and an environment they can thrive in. Still, that is not enough; great people on your team must be cultivated and cared for no different than your customers, clients, and patients.
I suggest these 5 components to make it happen and make them great.
Motivation – what is the driving force both for your organization, more importantly for each individual team member who is responsible to help make it possible…these are personal things, each person must have their own goals and motivation and it’s really essential that you know what these are and what they wish to have happen for their future. If you do not then there is no way to be certain that their involvement in your organization is going to assist them in getting to their desired outcomes and progress for their own lives. This is why businesses lose many great people without ever knowing it – because they never knew them.
Empowerment – I believe the keys to empowerment are three fold: trust to care for responsibilities; belief that they are capable and the outcome is possible; and control and responsibility over decisions and actions necessary to be executed to achieve the stated outcome and satisfy expectations. This means that people must be giving the opportunity to both succeed and fail – to win and to lose – there is no such concept of empowerment where you only do well…you don’t give the all-star the ball with the only possibility of them making the shot, it could go the other way too, but trust, belief, and opportunity are the only things you can give, when you do that you truly empower people to do well.
Training – self explanatory, but never the less overlooked; training specific to the skills required to achieve the goals you have, to master the responsibilities someone has been endowed with…training is usually underestimated, not thought through and usually elementary in nature. You simply can’t tackle training in a cookie cutter way. One way to know if your people are competently trained is…to ask! Because what you think is irrelevant, how they feel is all that matters and what will dictate and determine their performance.
Accountability – great people want to be held accountable. Plain and simple. In fact, really amazing superstars don’t care about their scores and stats being plastered on the front page of the paper, they don’t even care about trophies, but they do care about knowing. Every person who is a serious performer wants to know if they are doing well, how they can get better, and what’s next in terms of challenge, success, goals. The only way to do that is to have accountability. You do not have performance and success without something to gauge it by. Most are very lazy about this and wonder why.
Reward – okay, so, do I even need to write this. Of course you have to have some rewards. I find really stupid people who say “There doesn’t not need to be a reward because you are already getting paid to do the work” but you know what, didn’t your parents ever give a cookie or ice cream when you were well behaved. Why? You are just suppose to be a good boy or girl. What about for doing well in school or anything else. Of course. Rewards are human nature. Besides great people want to have great rewards, they are not motivated by the reward they are just grateful for it. I can tell you this, rewards are seldom money, they can be recognition, food, surprises, vacations, or many other things, the best rewards are symbolic and/or things that a person would never do for themselves. Rewards can also be extra benefits. I know some people where the rewards are earning the right to work from home so many days per week. All I’m telling you is, actions and execution are what you are paying for but rewards are what others want to earn. And that’s the key word. In fact you wouldn’t even want someone who didn’t desire to achieve more than what they were paid to do. These are often individual things and decisions, none the less, they are critical to avoid complacency and the status quo from creeping in.
There is a lot to think about here and assess.
If you have great people but they are not always performing up to their ability and quality of greatness, I promise you this – look at these five and you will find one or more of them missing and that is why amazing people underperform.
Don’t fall victim to bad leadership, poor management, and not enabling your people to be the best they are capable of because any one of these components are missing.
I’m certain, now, after reading this, you have work to do, people to engage, and conversations to have. Get to it.
Category : Blog
