After hiring a team, it is important that you keep them engaged and motivated so that they can be efficient and effective at their work. How to engage and motivate the team requires that you nurture leaders and managers throughout the organization. Failure to keep the team engaged can be a barrier to the growth of the organization. The role of great managers is to educate and coach their teams.
Spending more time training and coaching people yields better returns compared to investing in research and development and capital expenditures.
- When people leave companies, most of the time it is the managers that make them leave and not the organization as a whole. That is why it is important to keep your team happy and engaged by having great managers. Nobody is born a great manager. Managers need to keep on learning and advancing their skills and those of their employees.
- One of the biggest barriers to growth is the failure to nurture leaders
Google is one example of a company that has been successful at keeping its employees engaged. Insights from its data analytics showed that periodic one-on-one coaching ranked as the number one key to being a successful leader. Successful managers should have these coaching sessions with each of their team members. The coaching sessions should focus on five topics which represent the five main activities of effective managers as indicated below:
1| Help direct supports focus on their strengths
Strength is something that gives you energy and not necessarily something that you are good at. On the other hand, weakness is something that drains the life out of you even though you might be good at it.
Successful managers help individual employees to focus more on activities that give them strength and less on activities that make them weak. Strength-b based management practices help managers to have employees that are engaged and happy and are able to lift your organization to high levels of performance.
2|Do not demotivate
How to engage and motivate the team means focusing on ensuring that people are not demotivated and give less priority to motivating them. They prevent bottlenecks that may interfere with their team’s performance. This includes ensuring talented employees are not demotivated by B and Players and even requires fixing people issues like “firing” a client. The goal of the manager should be to make the job of their team easier.
3| Set clear objectives
Great managers focus on the bigger picture; what is supposed to be achieved and explain to the people how their work contributes to the greater company objectives. Once the people are aligned to the company objectives, they proceed to outline the outcomes of their team’s work; the expectations should be clear and consistent. Defining the “what” and not the “how” gives the employees the autonomy and liberty to use their own execution-style to achieve the intended results.
Autonomy, one of the three drivers of human motivation, is an important aspect as it gives the employees liberty to apply their own style of execution. The key performance indicators should be set out early enough as well as the expected outcomes. In some cases, the main bottlenecks that each employee must fix in a given period should be clearly outlined.
4| Show appreciation and give recognition;
People want to be recognized for good work. The way people want to be recognized varies. Successful managers test different approaches until they find specific approaches that work best with each of their direct supports.
How can a manager ensure that feedback to an employee will be helpful? One technique they can use is the “Sandwich Feedback Technique”. This is a three-step feedback method that starts with praise, criticism, and more praise. They can start with positive feedback, then give constructive feedback and end with positive feedback.
The feedback should be aimed at helping employees improve their work. Research has shown that for employees to be productive and happy at work, the ratio of praise (appreciation) to criticism (reprimands) with their managers should be 3:1.
5| Hire fewer people but compensate them more
You need to come up with a differentiated industry strategy, core values, business model, and brand promise that will attract the best talent because people will sacrifice certain perks to work with a firm with a worthy purpose. Avoid copying somebody else’s system. Great managers go to great lengths to keep key people who drive performance, including a customized compensation package.
Summary
How to engage and motivate the team requires that you educate and coach your people. This keeps your people loyal and your company competitive. Investing in your people will determine your company’s ability to beat your competitors and the overall market. A great company should continually train its people as it increases the value and capacity of human assets of the company; creates potential future leaders and reduces turnover.