By seizing business opportunities and setting clear company goals, you’ve created a sustainable and successful business that has grown from a couple of employees to a significantly bigger number. This is a fantastic outcome, as it means you’ve achieved financial security for yourself and your closest ones and leaves you in a strong position for ongoing growth.
So, why do you feel more overworked and stressed than ever before? First of all, business growth typically leads to an increased number of employees. And rather than making your professional life easier, the process of having more and more employees can often cause your workload to increase. So, suddenly, your days become a series of continuous interruptions from your employees who call you or come to you for problem-solving.
To avoid this scenario, you need to know how to build a winning team at work that can help you become great by carrying the load on their own. So, how do you make a winning team?
Set The Direction From Day One
First, influential business leaders chart a defined course and communicate their plans to all team members from day one. One effective way in which you can do this is by composing a playbook for business, which is a document that includes all your business’s SOPs, processes, and policies. This manual outlines how your company does what it does, contains the comprehensive business strategy and explains each company’s role and responsibilities.
When new employees go through your corporate playbook on day one, they can clearly understand your company’s goals and start working together toward a common destination. Nevertheless, you should not stop there, as you should ensure that every employee perfectly understands how they contribute to your company along the way.
Play To Each Employee’s Strengths
Every team member wants to feel valued, and when you play to each employee’s strengths, they take more pride in their professional contributions. As a matter of fact, people who use their strengths each day are three times more likely to have an excellent quality of life, and this group of employees reports feeling 8% more productive and 15% less likely to quit their jobs than other employees.
Okay, but how can you know about each person’s strengths? For starters, observe them closely while they are working, and don’t forget to compliment them on what they do well. Also, talk to your managers and supervisors to identify each employee’s strengths and ensure that each person is in a job position where they can use them the most. Finally, learn how to communicate effectively with your employees and ask them about their expertise, even if they’ve been on the payroll for a few months. This way, you can find that you already have people on your payroll who can handle the problems your company is facing.
Provide Them With The Needed Training And Education
Many time-poor business owners and managers tend to skimp on career development opportunities and training. But, of course, it’s not that they don’t truly understand or care about the value of guidance and coaching; they don’t have the time for it. So, when pressing deadlines are everywhere around you, how do you spare the time to provide your workforce with the needed training and education about their job position?
First, take a deep breath and remember that each minute you spend on training now will save you precious amounts of time in the future. In addition, once everyone receives guidance and proper instructions, you and your employees will experience less stress and frustration along the way. For that reason, make sure to spare time and develop training materials or consider bringing in external help to provide your employees with training and education, thus developing a winning team at work.
Learn How To Say Goodbye When It’s Necessary
Very often, business leaders hang onto employees who either don’t fit their company’s culture or lack basic skills for the job position. In that context, remember that nobody wins when you delay the inevitable—not you, not the employee, and indeed not the rest of your team.
Even though it can be painful, it’s best to be open with them about their future if you deal with such employees or employees. Learn how to say goodbye when necessary and help them move onto something new where they’ll be better able to advance and contribute in their career.
Final Words
In the end, if you know something needs to be done and acknowledge the strategies mentioned above as helpful but don’t know where to start, randomly select one area and go from there. Pick a strategy that really stood out to you. For example, perhaps you need to improve your training efforts, or you have an employee that you need to let go of.
Along the way, as you start to implement changes in your culture, you will begin to notice changes in your culture. In fact, positive gains provide momentum for future improvements as well. So, step by step, you’ll develop a winning team at work, one that will be able to make decisions in your absence and one that you’ll be proud of.
