8 keys to develop your talents' engagement
"None of us is as smart as all of us." -- Ken Blanchard
Why should you focus more on team’s engagement and motivation to boost your results?
Every progressive manager understands the role a good and motivated team can play in manoeuvring successful business outcomes. Companies rely more and more on technology, however, people still play an indispensable role in any organisation. Leaders need to exercise caution when dealing with their team members since small matters can derail and hit their productivity. The new generations, millennials and generation z, are highly changing the workplace and your company needs to cater to their needs if you want to stay competitive.
Excellent team leaders know the secret to keep their team members happy to ensure great performance. Good examples come from companies such as Google or Facebook when they implement sustainable and unconventional methodologies of learning. You can learn from those progressive companies by following their initiatives to complete what you will learn in our article. We highlighted for you 8 keys to maintain and enhance your team members’ motivation.
Key 1: Hire the right talents
“Hire for attitude, train for skills”
Before focusing on how to manage your people, start focusing on ‘who to hire’. Turnover, staff absence and lack of motivation are costing a lot to your company. In order to develop a motivated environment, you need to hire the right talents. Recruiting the right mix of people in terms of skill and organisational fit ensures a smooth workflow for the entire organisation. When selecting a new candidate, a good way to successfully accomplish this is to ‘hire for attitude and train for skills’. With the right attitude, the right candidate will achieve a lot more than a highly qualified but undermotivated candidate.
Key 2: Develop your leaders
You can hire the best talents, if they don’t have inspiring leaders to help them accomplish great things, your company will not perform at its best. Your leadership team needs to lead by example. You need to select the right people to lead your business to success. Great leaders are flexible, eager to learn and grow to better develop their people. Having the right leaders isn’t enough, provide them with all the resources they need to ensure your organisation’s success. A great way to do so is to offer regular training solutions to develop their technical and soft skills. Have a look at our training suite for managers.
Key 3: Boosting team’s engagement and motivation by creating a sense of belonging
A leader needs to give a sense of belonging to their team members. Employees need to feel like they belong to the team and the company. Your talents will be more motivated if they feel happy and part of the family for a greater purpose than just their job.
Your leaders need to help team members feel included, loved and mentored in order to stay together in the long run. Good work environments are the ones that have fresh relationships between the team members, ensuring that the atmosphere is breezy and going. Team members need to feel connected in order to be happy and productive; how connected are your talents?
Key 4: Empower your team members to boost their engagement and motivation
Your talents will better perform if you allow them a certain degree of freedom. I never met a micro-managed high-performing team, simply because they were missing empowerment, engagement and motivation. Employees must be encouraged to take initiatives and to make decisions as long as it’s in sync with their role and scope of work. Responsible team members are best motivated when they are recognised for their qualities and empowered with reasonable authority.
Key 5: Adapt to people and situations
It might be tempting in a growing company to adopt a one size fits all approach in management and leadership, and it might work… with robots. As your talents are all different, you want to stay flexible in your approach to ensure great results. Don’t get me wrong, you still need structure and processes, you only want to leave room for novelty and specific situations. Based on the situational leadership model, get ready to adapt to people and situations.
Key 6: Offer growth opportunities to boost team engagement and motivation
Have you already met someone who told you “ Please, I don’t want to grow and I don’t want to learn anything”. Personally, I have never met someone like that, every individual joins an organisation with the purpose and dream of achieving growth. Companies that cater to this essential need are always fuelled with motivated team members. Engagement, continual learning, career progress and enabling growth environments are keys to boost employee motivation. By offering growth opportunities to your talents, you motivate them to perform better.
Key 7: Gain your team’s trust & confidence to develop their engagement and motivation
Without trust, there is no relationship. Trust and motivation at work are strongly connected and linked. For most individuals, motivation is dependent on a feeling of trust about the leader and the organisation they work for. We don’t really quit a job or an organisation, we quit a manager. Trust needs to be developed at every level of the organisation. An easy way to achieve that is transparency, communicate with your team members, tell them what is happening and don’t try to hide things from them.
Key 8: Take your team to the next level – Team building activities & professional development training
Explore some team-building strategies and activities to boost your team’s energy, motivation and knowledge. Team building activities and learning sessions are providing the right environment to develop skills while encouraging discussions and debates to improve existing processes.
By implementing the 8 keys, you will help your team move from a simple group of people to a strong performing team. Be sure to engage yourself in a continuous process. Working on team’s engagement and motivation isn’t a one-time thing that you can quickly fix; it is an ongoing process.
Maud Vanhoutte.
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