• Do you want to be a boss people love, while also driving high performance?
• Do you want to have a high-performing team that strives for greatness, even in the face of uncertainty?
• Building morale and high performance are about engagement, and engagement is all about learning.
With last week’s business leaders tip we spoke about distracted and disconnected teams. Further, I suggested, in most small and large businesses today, the typical level of employee disengagement hovers around 70 percent. Managers who focus on team members' strengths cut employee disengagement to 1 percent. (Not by 1 percent, but to 1 percent.)
So, what's the secret to having an engaged and productive team?
It's having a plan for developing all employees - no matter where they are on their personal learning curves.
In over twenty years of coaching, managing, and consulting, I have seen that employees need continuous learning and fresh challenges to stay motivated, engaged and enthusiastic for personal and professional growth.
Better morale and higher performance happen through learning, argues Whitney Johnson in her newly released book, ‘Build A Team’. The best bosses know this, and they know how to make it happen by thoughtfully designing people’s jobs around the skills they have today as well as the skills they'll need to be even more valuable tomorrow. That's how small and large businesses stay competitive in an unpredictable, rapidly changing business environment. Frequently, as a manager, I was looking to offer exciting individual and team projects to my team members that encouraged enjoyment, challenges and learning opportunities.
In this book, Johnson explains how to become one of those bosses and how to build your A-team by:
• Identifying what your employees already know and what they need to learn,
• Designing their jobs to maximise engagement and learning, and
• Applying a seven-step process for leading each person up their learning curve.
We all want opportunities to learn, experiment, and grow in our jobs. When our bosses work with us to help us leap to new challenges, the result is a team that knows how to thrive, no matter what the future holds.
Reference: Whitney Johnson: ‘Build an A-Team: Play to Their Strengths and Lead Them Up the Learning Curve’
