As any manager will tell you, team performance is a major determining factor in a company’s success. But, boosting engagement, motivation, and productivity is easier said than done.
No matter how good employees are, there’s always room to improve and grow. The Japanese call it “CANI”, which stands for Constant and Never-Ending Improvement. Concerning employees, it means that they work to constantly improve their skills, which makes them very hard to replace in the workplace.
Unfortunately, a lot of managers face a huge challenge when it comes to finding effective ways to make teams better.
If that’s you, read the rest of this article to learn 15 ways you can support your team and help them advance their careers.
1. Communication
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Communication is a key component of great team performance, and ensuring that each member of your team has good communication skills is a great place to start. In fact, I don’t know any successful employee or manager who wasn’t good at communicating.
Communication is important because it shows how professional employees are, as well as how well they work. It also serves to avoid unnecessary conflicts at work.
But, building up verbal communication skills requires a lot of practice and you can help your team improve that skill in several ways, such as:
- Organize Team Building Activities: A great way to develop verbal communication is for employees to take part in team-building activities and games that help to decrease social anxiety levels. The more they get to know their workmates, the easier it is for them to communicate with each other.
- Encourage Public Speeches: Most people shudder at the thought of speaking in public and would do almost anything to get out of giving a presentation in front of a large group. However, you can encourage your team to practice their presentation skills in front of smaller groups.
- Have an Open-Door Policy: This encourages open communication, discussion, and feedback from all your employees about any concerns that they might have. An open-door policy also helps to maintain employee morale and decrease employee turnover.
2. Goal Setting
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Another creative way to improve team performance is to encourage effective goal-setting. Goals motivate us to grow and achieve more, without them, we become stagnant and aimless.
Unfortunately, most people don’t set realistic goals. To set effective goals, employees must focus on two things:
- What they want to achieve
- How they will achieve it
Teach employees how to set goals that are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-tied)
A lousy goal like “I need to do better at work” doesn’t inspire confidence or motivation.
But, you can see how an employee stands a better chance of achieving a goal like “I want to improve my communication skills by taking an eight-week course so I can be considered for a promotion.”
3. Conflict Resolution
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Learning conflict resolution is a simple yet incredibly powerful way to improve team effectiveness. Conflict is bound to arise in an arena where people come together for the purpose of problem-solving.
But, conflict among employees isn’t always easy to resolve – even in the most well-adjusted teams.
That’s why managers need to teach conflict resolution skills to their team to help lessen these types of incidents and make resolution faster and more effective.
Here are some techniques you might consider:
- Train Employees in Conflict Resolution: It’s usually the manager’s job to resolve conflicts among employees. But, by training your employees to solve their disagreements, you can save time and prevent disagreements from escalating unnecessarily.
- Share Conflict-Resolution Policies: This is an official document for your organization that outlines how to deal with problems, frustrations, and misunderstandings that might occur in the workplace. It makes it easier for everyone to know how to deal with conflicts.
Also Read: How To Introduce Yourself To A New Team?
4. Time Management
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Time management is another opportunity for improvement that your team can focus on. By learning to manage their time wisely, workers can not only get things done more productively but also reduce stress levels and avoid health issues like chronic fatigue and burnout.
As a manager, you can help employees improve their time management skills using a wide range of strategies and activities such as:
- To-Do Lists: You can keep a list with individual tasks and deadlines for each team member.
- Focus Software: Use software to assist in focused, distraction-free work (e.g. software that mutes social networking messages during work).
- Work Intervals: Employees can use techniques like the Pomodoro Technique to set work intervals so that they can avoid work overload and become more productive.
- Monotask: Many people think that multitasking is a more efficient way of doing things, but in fact, multitasking has negative effects and can interfere with working memory. Make sure workers know to give their full focus to one task at a time.
These are just some of the strategies and techniques you can use to help your team build up their time management skills. This way, they will learn how to effectively create timelines, schedule their tasks, estimate task length, and more.
All of this will help them throughout the day as they complete their activities in a more productive and less stressful way.
5. Teamwork
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Cooperation is a great skill to learn for anyone who works as part of a team. It makes it easier to share ideas and uncover creative solutions to problems.
As the adage goes, two heads are better than one. When employees come together to work as a team, it results in an explosion of ideas and solutions that are greater than the sum of their parts, so to speak.
You can help employees improve their teamwork skills in many ways, including:
- Team Building Activities: Organize games and other activities that allow employees to unite, get to know each other, and learn effective teamwork techniques.
- Adopt a Collaborative Policy: Create and share a collaborative policy that applies to all employees to ensure that everyone feels free to express themselves knowing that their ideas will be noted and evaluated.
6. Active Listening
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Yes, listening is an actual skill. This is an area of improvement every manager should focus on as it helps with the overall performance of the entire team. After all, if you can’t listen, you can’t communicate effectively, and there goes teamwork.
But active listening isn’t just about hearing what others are saying. It’s also about understanding what they are saying and giving considered responses.
It also means remembering the necessary information for the future. This requires a lot of concentration, which means switching off that auto-listening mode we use so much in our daily lives.
Here are a couple of tips you can share with your employees to help them enhance their active listening skills:
- Minimize Distractions: Encourage employees to put away all gadgets when talking to others to avoid being distracted by incoming calls, messages, and notifications.
- Schedule Important Conversations: Make sure they block out time for important conversations so they’re not disturbed by noisy colleagues.
- Practice Using Nonverbal Communication Cues: When conversing with someone, employees can use positive body language and gestures to show them that they are actively listening. For example, looking into someone’s eyes during a conversation shows that they have your undivided attention.
- Ask Questions: During the conversation, an active listener should ask questions to get more information. If there’s something that they don’t understand, they can simply reformulate the sentence to get more insights.
Also Read: Best Workplace Culture Examples To Follow
7. Training and Development
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As a manager, you can boost the value of your direct reports by encouraging professional development.
Investing in your team’s advancement comes with a ton of benefits, such as increased business growth, enhanced brand recognition, and higher employee retention rates. Employees stay at their positions longer when they know that their company cares about their growth and development.
As a manager, there are many ways you can support your team to help them develop their skill sets and knowledge, such as:
- Performance coaching
- Training opportunities within the company
- Establishing extra courses or programs outside working hours
You can push for professional or personal development to help your employees be more expansive in their work and personal lives.
Nurture them, and in turn, they will become specialists whose talents and efficiency serve to improve overall company performance.
The first step is to conduct performance evaluations to help you identify core areas for improvement for each employee. This way, you’ll know which professional skills to focus on to make those people more valuable to your business.
8. Organization
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Organization is among the top areas of improvement for managers to share with the teams. Workers need to learn this skill so they can prioritize and stay focused on essential tasks that allow them to get things done in the most efficient way possible.
This skill is closely related to time management and also involves learning how to assign deadlines to tasks based on the amount of work that can reasonably be completed each day.
It’s important to avoid overestimating or underestimating what’s possible, otherwise productivity will suffer and objectives won’t be achieved.
Here are some techniques you can use to help employees level up their organizational skills:
- Prioritize Tasks: Employees must learn to prioritize tasks according to their impact on the overall goal.
- Avoid Multitasking: As previously noted, multitasking does more harm than good so employees must accomplish tasks one at a time to be more effective.
- Remove Clutter: Whether the employees are working in a physical space or online (using software), it’s important to avoid clutter and only keep the things they need around them.
- Use Digital Apps: There are various organizational and time-tracking apps that employees can use to easily prioritize tasks and define project milestones.
Also Read: Positive Feedback Examples For Peers & Employees
9. Problem-Solving
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Problem-solving is an essential skill for employees in any type of work environment. Employees should be able to solve problems by looking at the situation and thinking about the different options available to them, and then being able to choose the best one relevant to the situation at hand.
Problem-solving skills allow employees to handle any challenging situations, even if they have never gone through anything similar before. They’ll be able to use their reasoning and intuitive powers to find creative solutions to any new problems they encounter.
Here are some tactics you can share with employees to help them enhance their problem-solving skills:
- Take a systematic approach to solving problems
- Involve other team members in their problem-solving process
- Always think of more than one way to solve a problem
10. Honesty
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Honesty and trust are two traits that go hand-in-hand together. Honesty means being truthful in all situations, good and bad. It means holding fast to your values even when it might not be in your best interest to do so.
When team members are honest in everything they do, it helps to improve the way they deal with each other which ultimately draws them closer and builds bonds of friendship, respect, and trust.
Trust comes from doing what you said you’d do when you said you’d do it. If you’re unable to do so, then you must be honest about it. The more team members can be honest with each other, the more they will trust each other, and the more effective and productive they will ultimately become.
Check Out: Personal Development Goals For Managers
11. Leadership
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Although some employees may not see it that way, leadership is actually an important skill for any employee to have, not just managers. That’s because everyone needs to learn to lead themselves if they want to progress in their career.
Leadership skills make it easier for individuals to practice independent problem-solving and self-motivation. This skill is even more important for anyone who aspires to become a manager so that one day they can lead others.
Here are some ways you can encourage your team to build their leadership skills:
- Schedule Team Building Events: These types of events make it possible for employees to take charge and practice problem-solving within the team.
- Encourage Workers to Volunteer: Make things like fundraising and volunteering at nonprofits part of your company culture to help workers learn important leadership skills.
- Offer Leadership Courses: You can encourage your workers to enroll in online leadership courses for continual improvement of this essential skill.
12. Customer Service
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All successful businesses have one thing in common: great customer service. Even if you already have an established reputation as an excellent provider of customer service, it’s still worth encouraging employees to further improve this critical skill.
The most obvious way to demonstrate customer service for your team is to practice it yourself in everything you say and do. This will encourage those under you to follow your lead.
13. Flexibility
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This is an important area for professional improvement in the workplace. Flexibility embraces the concept that an employee can be productive regardless of when or where they do their work.
So, instead of enforcing a rigid work schedule or environment, managers can acknowledge individual needs that better support a more balanced work-life experience.
This leads to increased employee well-being and satisfaction which leads to higher retention rates.
However, employees need to take full responsibility for their own flexibility. It means they need to be versatile, resilient, versatile, and responsive to change. As a manager, you can help employees learn how to become more flexible by offering:
- Problem-Solving Activities: At its core, flexibility is all about recognizing that there are many different ways to complete any job. Create problem-solving challenges, games, and activities to help employees practice this skill in different situations and environments so they can learn to adapt to new circumstances faster and with less stress.
14. Writing
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In today’s information era, good writing skills are the cornerstone of any business. If your business relies heavily on written communication, then you must consider ways to help your employees master the skill of writing.
There are some tools like Grammarly and the Hemingway app that assist in catching common grammar and spelling mistakes. However, those tools don’t do much in helping to improve the clarity and quality of the user’s words.
To help your team improve their written communication skills, you can:
- Create an Internal Stylebook: This is a collection of documents and resources that employees can use when composing written text for the business, whether this is for blogs, social media, ads, emails, or other marketing collateral.
15. Giving and Accepting Feedback
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Last on our list of key employee areas of improvement is the ability to give and receive feedback.
Giving feedback allows employees and teams to see any mistakes they made at work, and being able to accept feedback allows them to find ways to resolve them. This helps to improve employee performance, provided quality feedback is offered.
The problem is that some employees get offended easily when receiving feedback, while others are less than subtle when giving constructive criticism.
For this reason, all workers need to practice this important skill so everyone can work together effectively.
Here are some tips to help you help your team:
- Create a Mentorship Program: As a manager, you can assign a mentor to any struggling employee to offer one-on-one guidance to help them improve.
- Develop a Performance Improvement Plan: Make it easy for your team members to improve by providing them with a step-by-step plan to achieve their objectives.
- Don’t Make Feedback Personal: Whether delivering or receiving feedback, it’s important for all involved to avoid making it personal. Make sure feedback focuses on solving concrete issues rather than personal problems.
Conclusion
Not all managers are lucky enough to work with a team whose members are proficient in their work.
But, the good news is that if you know your team’s strengths and weaknesses, you can help them to improve those areas where their skills and experience are lacking.
Use the tips outlined in this guide to help you excel as a manager so you can build a strong team and spur your company’s growth.
