Keep talking

As leaders surely all want the best out of our team, to be high performing and achieve great results.

But what effort and thought do you put into determining the best way to develop your people, your most valuable and expensive resource?  Or, like many do you just default to how it has always been done, what you’ve known for years and what is organised by the HR team?

If you have followed me through this blog series read the e-book and watched the accompanying short videos you will hopefully get a theme.  As much as this is about business improvement its also about improving your leadership skills and absolutely about improving the work experience and meaning for your team.

At the start of this series based on our free Tricordant Guide e-book ‘5 Winning Ideas to improve your Business Results’, I said these ideas were for all leaders and not improvement specialists.  That is especially true of this subject which is the bonus idea in the e-book and related to how to work with your staff on performance management.

Have you set the dates for your next round of annual performance reviews?  Looking forward to them, and to the one with your boss?  If you are anything like the majority of employees you are probably dreading the thought of them.  Some leaders are magnificent at such reviews, the majority somewhere between dreadful and mediocre.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t do or get annual performance reviews.  Once a year awkward forms and strained conversations where generally neither party wants to be in the room or to be totally honest with each other.  Maybe its my rebel spirit, I like to think its my quest for improving the lives of everyone in the workplace. I have worked in some very high performing teams but these off the shelf annual reviews have never featured – we needed something better and personal.

In the world of improvement there is the concept of continuous improvement ie keep improving day after day, year after year.  Also, the days of the quality control inspector has gone.  No longer the person at the end of the line accepting or rejecting; replaced by checking and reviewing at every stage.

There is also the concept of Plan-Do-Study-Act (also referred to as Plan-Do-Check-Act).  This is a continuous cycle of work planning, understanding the work to be done, planning it, doing it then studying/checking what happened and then acting on any necessary revision.  So the cycle goes on.

Why then with our most important asset (that’s a whole other subject) do we reduce reviews to once a year or irregular reviews?  Surely it should be continuous!

A great leader is always working on their business and seeking growth and improvement.

Let me give you a top tip;

A great leader is always talking with, helping and guiding their team to be the best they can. 

Why wouldn’t you want to be one of them.  Great leaders continuously work and talk with and listen to their team.  Performance management is just part of the normal way of working.

Getting started on your improvement journey has 3 simple action steps:

1. Read the e-book and watch the videos
2. Decide which improvement idea you want to start with
3. Be a successful leader focused on growth and improvement

So, read the e-book and watch the videos.

Within an hour you can be on your way to feeling like you are growing; knowing results will follow and you are guiding your team to continued success.