Four tips to set your team up for success

As managers, we hear and read statistics about how how employees don’t quit jobs, they quit bad managers. While it’s an oversimplification of a complex topic, I have had fair share of moments with managers I didn’t mesh with to understand that a difficult boss can make for a challenging work environment. Since we spend so many of our waking hours at work, bad bosses can truly make life miserable.

The other side of that is that a good boss can make many less than desirable jobs a good place to work. I firmly believe that’s because people have had so many bad experiences with bad managers, that once you find a good one, you never want to leave them.

In this time of some of the highest turnover in recent history, it’s important that we as managers do everything in our power to create the kind of environment team members don’t want to leave. Your first priority as a manager should be focusing on setting your team up for success. If they aren’t successful, we won’t be successful.

1) Your job is to make your team successful

Unless you’re the CEO of your company, you’ve got a boss. Even CEOs have boards and shareholders to report to. The most common trap I see managers fall into is to look at the goals their manager lays out for them as their first priority. From those goals, the manager will delegate tasks to the people that report to him or her, and then it is the manager’s job to ensure those tasks get checked off on time. After all, it is the manager’s goals, so ensuring that their reports do the tasks to accomplish those goals makes intellectual sense. This leads to two problems:

2) Team Members, Not Employees

Once we realize that we need the people that report to us to be successful, we need to change our mindset of how we see them. The most successful managers I’ve worked with and for have always embraced the coach / player over a manager / employee mindset.

3) Identify team member strengths

Once you’ve realized that you are the coach of your team, you need to figure out how to make your team great. Every team member is unique. They all have unique skillsets, and they each have a unique vision for where they want their careers to go. Our biggest challenge as a coach is to identify those strengths and goals and align them with our teams goals. How do we do that? We talk to our team as often as we can in both formal and informal situations. We must have a drive to understand our team, so that we can utilize their talents to help us accomplish big goals.

• Have Check-ins often. Make sure to have an agenda, and don’t let the check-in turn into a status meeting.
• Listen for what your team member enjoys doing.
• When you identify something they’ve done well, let them know.

More: Eight Tricks for Effective Check-ins for New Managers

4) Follow-up on Commitments

This is probably the one thing we have the most control over, yet it is often the most overlooked. As managers, we are often very busy, and things can easily slip our minds. However, I remind you that we aren’t successful unless our team is successful. We need to build trust with our team members that when we say that we are going to do something, we follow through on at commitments. Here are some ways I’ve used in the past to keep track of tasks

• Keep a check list of tasks in a notebook.
• Use Outlook calendar to set reminders
• Use Outlook tasks to keep track of what still needs to be done.

No matter what tool you use, just make sure you follow-up in order to show the team member how important they are.

Succeed by helping others succeed

Too often we are focused on ourselves in order to be successful. However, when we take the focus off of us and put it on our team, we will find that we become even more successful.