Creating and Sustaining a Powerful Workplace Team

Probably one of the most difficult achievements for any manager is to assemble and maintain the right team to take their business to a higher level. Sometimes you get it right, and then someone leaves and the whole dynamic collapses. It can leave you feeling like you just fell in front of the finish line of a 100 metre sprint.

So what is the secret behind successfully assembling and maintaining the right team? Here are a few guidelines to help you accomplish your goals.

Assemble the Right Talent: When I say talent, I mean talent, not people. Engaged employees are employees who are working in areas that maximize their strengths. They are excellent at what they do and derive great pleasure from being able to use their talents to achieve successful outcomes at work.

Assembling the right talent may mean that you will have to juggle people around a little, and you will likely have to fire those disengaged employees (and so you should), but taking the time to do this will pay off in the long run.

When looking for employees, make sure you hire the best people possible, and pay them well. You don’t want your employees feeling like you’ve taken advantage of them. Many employers try to get the best for the least thinking they have a winning hiring strategy, but that is actually a deadly move. People may join your company because they are fearful of not finding something else, but as long as they feel exploited they will harbour feelings of bitterness and will not meet your performance expectations. They will quickly join the ranks of the actively disengaged and will either have to be fired, or will leave for another job. Either way, you lose.

As you examine your immediate hiring needs, think of your future needs as well. Great leaders hire great replacements. Make sure you are looking for people who will be able to fulfill your future leadership needs as well as your present support staff needs. It’s good to have a pool of potential leaders in place so that you can offer better opportunities to your existing employees and shorten the learning curve for someone who has been given a new position.

Attitude is another important component in talent selection. Most skills can be learned, but attitude is not a skill, and neither is happy, pleasant, co-operative or helpful. First look for pleasant, happy people, then try to get the skill set that is required. You know what they say: people get hired for their technical skills and fired for their people skills. Save yourself some grief and put nice people on the shortlist.
When hiring, don’t make false promises and don’t hire people who have ambitions that your company cannot accommodate. If someone has dreams of running the company and you have a family owned business, for example, then don’t waste your energy on that person. If he or she takes the job, they will become frustrated and quit because of lack of opportunity. Remember, frustrated employees are not highly productive. They are disengaged!

A great team is comprised of people who find their work challenging and meaningful. Make sure you always provide as much variety as possible and that your employees understand how meaningful their contribution is to the company.

Someone once commented to me that that is hard to do in some positions, because no one dreams of becoming a great CSR. I contend that hiring the right kind of people for the position makes it easier to show people how meaningful their work is to the company. Someone who enjoys the challenge of helping a customer solve a problem, or who feels a great sense of accomplishment when they turn an angry customer into a great supporter will always feel challenged by their role in Customer Service. If as a manager, you continue to support your people and show daily appreciation for their efforts, they will find their work to be meaningful as well. It’s all about choosing the right people and doing the right things with them.

Of course, a very important “right thing to do” with your people is to train them. Zig Ziglar once said, “The only thing worse than training people and losing them, is not training them and keeping them.” Needless to say, Mr. Ziglar is a man after my own heart. An untrained employee will quickly become a disengaged employee. A big part of supporting your people is providing ongoing training. By helping your employees become better, they gain mastery, increase confidence and self-esteem, and will automatically contribute to building the bottom line. Trust me!

Strive to Create a Diverse Team: A homogeneous workplace team will not be as successful as a diverse team. Having different kinds of people from different backgrounds on your team will allow you to see many points of view. You do not know what you do not know. Be open-minded and allow yourself to benefit from other points of view.

When you think of creating a diverse team, think about hiring people from different cultures, age groups, genders, and even those with disabilities. There should be a place for everyone! Take the time to learn about different cultures and even different generations. We are working in a time when people from four different generations occupy positions in the workplace. Each has their own set of experiences and values that colour their attitudes about work and life in general. Add to that the diverse cultures that make up our metropolitan areas and you have a wonderful opportunity to gain insight into the changing needs of our society. Companies who understand this and hire people from all walks of life, do better than those who don’t.

Empower Your People: Empowered employees are engaged employees. You can’t have one without the other, but do you know what a truly empowered employee looks like? Employee Empowerment is a poorly understood term. Many managers have no real idea how to empower their people. They just know that it is something that is supposed to be good for the work environment. Because they don’t really understand how to create an empowered team, they often make mistakes that have disastrous consequences.

To empower your people you must first make sure everyone has lots of information. Share everything. You cannot expect great results when people don’t have a complete understanding of the business, so share the good, the bad and the ugly. Besides, withholding information creates mistrust, and no team can function effectively where there is an absence of trust.

Secondly, decide to not interfere with the process of getting things done. Allow people to make decisions and plan strategies for completing tasks. People will naturally rise to the level of responsibility you give them. Don’t micromanage!
Share your power by asking for input from your team. It is quite ok for the boss to say, “I was thinking of doing it this way. What do you think? Can you see any problems that may arise from this method? Do you know of a better way?” This is part of working with your team to uncover problems and provide solutions. Consider that you are in partnership with your team players.

The last important strategy for empowering your employees is to resist solving everyone’s problems. Have them bring you three possible solutions and then ask them which one they think is best and why? If you agree, then give the go-ahead. If you don’t, then present a case for your opinion and see if the employee can find flaws in your solution. Work together until you get it right. Odds are you will never have to re-evaluate a decision. Empowered employees usually make good decisions (because they are informed). If someone goofs up, try to learn from it and move on.

Create a Strategy for Continued Success: If you want your team to enjoy the kind of success that can thrive in spite of organizational or group changes, then you must employ strategies that will give your team stability. This means that as a leader you need to plan out what you will do if someone leaves the group. Even engaged employees can leave their jobs unexpectedly for reasons that even a great manager can neither prevent nor foresee such as if a spouse gets transferred, or a family member becomes seriously ill, or the employee suddenly dies. Always have a succession plan for each and every employee. You need to know exactly what you are going to do in an unexpected situation, so that you can keep up the momentum you have worked so hard to build.

Secondly, you must work with your team to document procedures. Anyone should be able to walk into a position and know exactly where to find directions if they get stuck. Not having a tried and true method of doing certain things, will turn every day business procedures and results into a crap shoot. Your team can provide you with a tremendous amount of helpful information regarding best practices. Develop and refine these together and keep everything documented. You don’t want to lose all of your procedures when you lose an employee.

Use an employee suggestion system to help you develop and refine those procedures. Toyota is known for implementing more than 99% of the suggestions it receives from its employees. In 2005 that was almost 600,000 suggestions implemented! That mentality of striving for continuous improvement is a huge part of the company’s success today.

It is often said that the mark of great leadership is not how well things run during a leader’s tenure, but rather how well things hold together after the leader has moved on. If the company or department falls apart after you have left, then you did not do your job well at all.

An edited version of this article has been published at www.humanresourcesiq.com