When you hire people to work on your team, they are rarely the finished article. Often, they require a few months to get their bearings and work out what the brand expects from them. This, however, can sometimes be a prolonged process. Colleagues can spend many months with your firm – years even – and never really get to the point you’d hoped when you originally hired them.
If you find yourself in this position, then this post is for you. In the following sections, we explain some of the strategies that exasperated leaders use to bring team members up to the mark.
Prioritize Recognition
Just imploring colleagues to work harder and better rarely works. When it comes to knowledge-based jobs, fear is a poor motivator. Instead, figure out how you can encourage employees to bring their A-game using recognition.
The statement “employees repeat what you reward” is a tired old maxim, but it is also true. Employers often overlook the benefits of simple leadership modifications, such as providing workers with public recognition for their efforts.
Delegate And Empower
When employees aren’t quite meeting the quality standards managers expect, the typical approach is to reduce their responsibilities until they “prove” themselves. But often, managers should take the opposite approach. You can often get more out of workers if you empower them and give them more autonomy over decision-making.
The reasons for this are quite complex but it all comes down to the personality of the individual worker. Some perform far better when they are able to direct their own work instead of taking endless orders from their superiors.
Commit To Continued Development
It is often easy to lose hope in certain employees and believe that you will never be able to bring them up to standard. That can lead some managers to reduce training opportunities to save money and, hopefully, encourage the worker to leave.
Quality leaders, however, explore all employee development options before pushing people out of the door. That’s because most underperforming workers are usually just one or two breakthroughs away from becoming highly competent in their roles. Training helps them to break through plateaus and get the best from themselves.
Communicate Your Vision
Sometimes employees have all the skills and technical expertise that you need, but they still refuse to perform. In many cases, the problem here isn’t procedural, it’s motivational. Colleagues simply don’t see why they should work so hard for your organization.
The trick here is to give them real motivation. If you can, align them with your vision by convincing them that it is important. Make it clear what you are trying to achieve and how their work fits into the grand scheme of things. It is often easier for colleagues to work hard if they understand why they are having to commit so many hours to a task.
In summary, smart managers know that employees usually have more to give than they are right now. So they look or opportunities for breakthroughs. They find ways to bring out their best so they don’t have to go through the complicated task of replacing them.
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