What’s the most important asset in your business? If your reply is about the facility or the brand of products you sell, hang on for a second. The reality is your people represent the business’s greatest asset.
Leaders have much better success motivating their employees’ creativity and hard work when they take the employees’ perspective and invite them to generate their own self-endorsed work goals.
The new style of leadership is a developmental process. When you replace giving directives and commands with working patiently and diligently to see the situation from the other person’s point of view, you have better success motivating others. Gathering input and suggestions to pull all that information together to offer some constructive goals and strategies creates sustainable changes. Although these approaches to motivating and engaging others are somewhat difficult, they are well worth the effort.
Leaders use certain behaviors to engage and motivate employees. They know they can’t control employee motivation.
Optimizing internal human resources are one of the quickest methods to add profit to the bottom line. To scale and leverage a business requires a strategy that makes sense. Learning how to maximize effective working relationships tends to improve with training and a company-wide developmental program.
Creating intentional strategies to maximize the return on your investment in your people just makes good common sense and is a good business decision. We get into business to make money. When you follow my dynamic living articles, you know having fun and enjoying life can be accomplished while you own or work in a thriving business. To think you work 100 hours a week but don’t have time to enjoy life is not a fulfilling lifestyle.
Leaders who recognize there is more potential to develop people than there are technical improvements or cost-cutting measures outperform those who don’t.
Numerous studies reveal every year that, without a doubt, the top 1 or 2 reasons talented people leave their place of employment are because of the culture and the way their supervisor treats them.
A leader always knows their own strengths and weaknesses. They want to maximize employees’ strengths and ensure their weaknesses do not weaken their strengths. They are a self-learner and seek to learn new attitudes and skills to maximize their effectiveness. The goal is to be the leader that followers like to follow.
Don’t think you can apply a one-size solution to improve your leadership capacity in your business. Improving one’s leadership abilities requires more than the five-step approach that many suggest. Each person is different, so their strengths and weaknesses are different. The learning path they need is unique to them.
Reading my articles, you know then that being effective and efficient can easily make more money in less time. A business with culture and leadership issues doesn’t mean the company isn’t profitable. It’s just not as profitable or satisfying to operate as it could be. It could be subject to chronic issues that could cause a business to fail quickly. Measuring the cost of turnover can lead to a loss of sleep at night. The numbers are staggering to realize, but there is an even more significant issue with many relatively easy solutions when leaders use the appropriate leadership style.
People issues cost your business about 25% of its efficiency.
Your business improves when your people improve, and leaders and management lead that process to affect the culture positively. An employee who needs consistent attention and coaching can easily cost you more time than they’re worth. You want to see them growing into a role vs. being shoved because they don’t have the right skills or attitude. Moving people into different positions to find what they are best suited is easily an intentional strategy to improve overall performance. You just have to do this for the right reasons.
Middle management people are often overlooked and don’t get the respect they deserve. Their ability to get the job done is a duplicatable trait, and many I know enjoy coaching others. They typically have wonderful insight to what works and what doesn’t. When one quits or dies, you know first-hand how painful and costly they can be to replace.
Unleashing the creativity of your management staff unlocks the controls to your business’s growth. There is more power to solve business problems and grow the opportunities when you unleash this natural creative energy you already have at your fingertips.
Motivation is a complex process to explain and equally difficult to realize fully. Science tells us that motives are internal experiences that can be categorized into needs, cognitions, and emotions that are influenced by a business’s culture.
These internal and external forces highlight how we can intervene to increase motivation. Depending on the motivational situation we are dealing with, we can design interventions that target physiological or psychological needs and make adjustments to the environment to create the opportunity for increased motivation.
“Among all the prospects that man can have, the most comforting is, on the basis of his present moral condition, to look forward to something permanent and to further progress toward a still better prospect”. Immanuel Kant
Finding what is easy to do is rarely what is effective. You often have to go back to the drawing board to do the challenging work of designing effective interventions and motivational support.
Unleash Creativity in Your Most Valuable Asset — Your People
Creating a learning and teaching environment creates a progressive culture that employees like. Key leaders with specific knowledge of performing a particular task or set of functions can quickly become teachers. Documenting these processes is a wonderful best practice to implement while creating a clearer pathway to scaling the business.
Many times, a one-on-one is needed to foster an individual’s talents. Based on the assessment of a group of leaders, they may require classroom-style training so they all hear the same organizational message, and you can measure the anticipated outcomes.
Those you’ve identified as up-and-coming leaders may need more clearly defined learning pathways and resources. Other individuals may require a personalized approach utilizing inside or outside resources.
Various classroom, online learning, and one-to-one resources are available and cost-effective today; yes, even executive coaching services are available. My service fits nicely into this kind of developmental and implementation work.
Remember, in most businesses, there is more potential to develop people than technical improvements or cost-cutting measures. Create that learning pathway so your young and mature leaders can be far more effective at influencing and optimizing your most important asset. You are better together.
