Intro...
Leading a team into high productivity is the next priority, once you have assembled an amazing team to help grow your business. Let’s look at the key ingredients you need for your team to thrive.
Since a team is only as effective and productive as those leading it, one of the best places to start is with your team leaders. Some of the most successful companies provide their leaders with leadership development opportunities through training, mentorship, and professional coaching. By doing this, effective leaders can:
- Focus on their talent
- Develop new skills and knowledge
- Expand their self-awareness and emotional intelligence
- Deliver their own roles and responsibilities to a higher standard
- Advance their communication to effectively disseminate business and project goals to their teams
- Engage their own accountability and manage their team’s accountability
- Learn to build, support, and nurture a strong team working environment
What Key Factors Drive High Productivity?
In last month’s blog, we talked about Tuckman’s Stages of Team Development that teams go through to work together efficiently. At the ‘Norming’ and ‘Performing’ stage, where a team becomes settled and starts working efficiently, we have put together some key factors that can play a big part in driving a team's high productivity:
- A unified team vision
- Team members have a clear understanding of their own roles in the group, as well as their teammates' roles and responsibilities
- Working together in a collaborative and constructive environment, agreeing on goals and strategic plans, dividing work equitably, and working together to develop ideas, concepts, and processes.
- Team support, motivation, and a positive culture
- Training, development, and coaching
Productivity is driven by a supported and positive environment. Your team members are just as human as you. They will be as invested as you are, and the people around them are invested in their purpose.
Successfully Leading A Team:
What can you do to invest And Support the Growth of your team to drive them into high productivity?
One of the most effective means of doing so is committing to promote their professional development and growth. Team development is often a long-term process, but it can deliver numerous short-term benefits. This may include employee loyalty, engagement, and improved performance. When you take a proactive approach toward employee development and growth, you are able to mitigate team challenges and improve productivity.
Let’s break down the top three options that can help a leader drive high productivity in a team:
Mentoring
A mentor is someone who has been in your situation, accomplished what you’re trying to do, and has seen it all. Most of the founders of exceptionally successful companies have worked with mentors all the time. For instance, Mark Zuckerberg’s mentor was Steve Jobs. Steve Job’s mentor was Mike Markkula. Eric Schmidt was the mentor of both Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
There are many reasons why a leader should have a mentor. A good mentor will:
- Enable you to gain the sort of experience which isn’t learned through formal education.
- Open up more networking opportunities for you since he/she is already investing in you and your team’s success.
- Be there to guide you, listen to your worries, placate apprehensions and help build confidence throughout the good and challenging times.
Peer Groups
Peer groups can play a vital role in developing leaders of a team. This can include:
- Assisting leaders by providing confidential peer support, guidance and advice they need to succeed professionally and personally.
- Adding members who can furnish you with practical knowledge that can help you with your challenges and opportunities.
- Providing you access to additional resources you may need to address any issue you might encounter.
- Serves as a sounding board for your ideas, and helps you learn insights from other members' successes and failures.
- Providing a safe and vulnerable place for you to be yourself without being judged. A peer group is a place where you can be honest with yourself and others so you aren’t alone in your successes, challenges, fears, or doubts.
Professional Coaching
When it comes to training leaders, professional coaching’s primary aim is to sharpen a leader’s effectiveness and, while doing so, transfer some of their knowledge and experience onto their team, thus helping to improve a team’s organizational effectiveness.
Professional coaching entails a one-to-one relationship that is designed to impart critical lessons via evaluation, challenge, and support. Though coaching may be directed to fix a fault, its principles are meant to enable successful leaders to get to the next level with more responsibilities and new intricate challenges.
A good coach will:
- Assist you in determining and focusing on what’s most important on your current journey.
- Be at hand to point out your blind spots by projecting the big picture of your business and help you figure out what steps are missing if you come across challenges, become overwhelmed, or veer off track.
- Enable you to gain a competitive advantage by helping you move from point A to point B quicker than you would on your own.
- Help you identify your strengths and weaknesses, and use them to your full potential as a great leader.
- Advance your personal growth by clarifying your priorities, eliminating limiting beliefs and resistance. They will be there to help you set value-oriented goals and hold you accountable to achieve them.
- Hold you accountable to your promised commitments, because after all, who else will?
Connect with me today to see how leadership development and leading a team can drive you and your team to success.
Meet Chris Hardwick
Executive Business Coach
For over 20 years I've been helping entrepreneurs and business leaders to realize their dreams and achieve success.
As an entrepreneur, world traveler, adventurer, and motivator, I lead by example. My goal is to inspire you with my passion for life, success and happiness.
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