Building a business is challenging! There’s so many pieces and parts: there’s marketing, sales, product or service delivery, financials, personnel issues, etc. If you try to do too much yourself, you burnout. If you build a team, it’s difficult to get and keep your team engaged. Most people have a team, but it's not working to its full potential. What about your team? Do you need the team members to step up? If so, read on to help uncover their untapped potential.

When we hire people, we usually focus entirely on the position. While you need someone to fill a specific role, don’t just focus on the role or position you need to fill. Focus on the person you are hiring. 

Good people don’t usually stay in their initial role. They have aptitude and motivation that enables them to grow and fill greater roles. It’s important that you know your people well. You may hire them for one role, but keep in mind that over time they might be better suited for a different role. 

When a position opens in your company, start by examining your current team members. Is there someone who’s well-suited for the new role? Even if they have never functioned in that space, people often have natural aptitude and interest in opportunities that arise. 

Helping them advance in your company accomplishes many things. It keeps your team members engaged. It rewards qualities and characteristics of a good worker. It provides an opportunity to pay them more and for them to make a more substantive contribution.

No one wants to just fill a role. People want to do work they enjoy at which they excel at doing. Understanding the innate strengths of your team members and opening opportunities for them to work in their strengths will cause people to work harder, engage more, and remain at your company for longer periods of time. 

When people work primarily in their strengths, their work is more productive. They are good at what they do. They like their work, and they find ways to improve the processes and streamline the tasks. All these things produce a better service or product for your customers. 

Take a fresh look at your team members. Do they really enjoy what they do? Are they productive in their role? If not, maybe they are not properly aligned. Maybe you need to allocate them to a different role.

Good people don’t like to be micromanaged. They prefer for you to establish clear boundaries and provide them freedom to do their jobs. This is particularly true of key team members.

Your willingness to empower key team members indicates that you trust and depend on them. It doesn’t mean you don’t provide periodic evaluations, but you expect them to carry a substantive daily load. 

You want to provide a clear job description and make sure they understand the 3-5 major responsibilities they must fulfill to do their job well. Once you establish those basic guidelines, turn them loose to do their jobs. 

Their authority and responsibility should be equally distributed. If they have great authority without clear responsibility, that’s a recipe for a disaster. If they have great responsibility with limited authority, that’s frustrating and discouraging. 

If you can get the right people on your team and empower them to take action, both you and they will be happy and productive.

It’s important to establish and utilize key metrics in evaluating team members. Once you provide a clear job description and help your team members determine and understand the key 3-5 tasks required to do their job well, you need to establish metrics to evaluate those key tasks.

You want to evaluate what they must do to be successful. When I meet with a key person in a company, I frequently ask them to explain their role in the company. They commonly explain their role well. 

The next thing I ask them is what are the 3-5 tasks that you need to do well to be successful in your role. Sadly, they struggle to answer this question. They have never thought about it. The owner hasn’t guided them, and they frankly just don’t know.

If your team members don’t know what they should focus on to be successful, the likelihood of them succeeding is very low. In contrast, if they know what they need to do, and you are evaluating their work based on those metrics, their success rate goes way up.

The last thing you want to do is make the results of employee evaluations a “gotta-you” situation. Evaluations, if handled properly, should be a time of commendation, suggested improvement, reward and encouragement. 

If your team members are not excelling, there’s a reason. You might have them in the wrong role. You may need to provide some additional training, or there may be something going on in their lives outside of work. 

Evaluating and developing personnel is a key responsibility in growing your company. If you want to be successful and profitable, don’t take this responsibility lightly.

Over the years, I have honed my skills to find the right people and develop them in various companies. If you would like to take a look at your team and uncover how they could become more productive and efficient, schedule a short call with me at https://penncoaching.com/meetwithdave.