What Your Team Needs from You

There’s a big difference between a team that has a great leader and a team that just has a leader. A team with a leader might excel if the leader gets stuck in and works alongside them. A team with a great leader could excel with or without them present. The difference is understanding what your team really needs from you. We’ll start things off with one clarification: they don’t need you to be there for constant hand-holding.

Direction

To begin with, no employee is going to be very valuable to the business if you’re not able to give them directions they can understand. But that truth goes beyond just helping them get to grips with their individual tasks. Those tasks, their workload, needs to fit a larger narrative. There are two to get them invested in. First, there is their personal narrative. By helping to train them, finding opportunities to grow new skills, and creating a development plan with them, you build a personal narrative. Then you build the narrative of the business by taking the time to get everyone familiar with the strategies of the business. They need to know why exactly they’re doing the work they’re doing. It shouldn’t just be for a paycheck, it should be because they know exactly how it contributes to the aims of the business as a whole.

Appreciation

The context that good direction adds to your team’s work adds value to it. But as well as them valuing their job, their job needs to value them, as well. Teams that don’t have proper appreciation shown grow hungry for it. Employees get dissatisfied and seek validation in any way they can, leading to internal rivalries and agreed that infiltrates the whole business. People are more willing to share their sense of achievement and their responsibility if the leader sets the example. It can be as simple as a custom-made trophy easily obtained from places like Dynamic Gift. Or it can be an additional break or even some public appreciation. So long as you keep showing it, people will work harder to earn it.

Cohesion

Addressing the individual’s need for appreciation helps the entire company culture. But the best parts of culture are shared. It helps those individuals see one another on the same boat. It’s what makes the whole business’s strategies so important. They know they’re not just doing it for themselves or for you, but for the whole team. So, create the sense of team shared culture by getting them together more often. Host events like bi-weekly after work drinks or get them sent off on more team building exercises. Give them every opportunity you can for them to see one another as real members of a team, not just people surrounded by a corporation.

Getting the absolute best out of your team means trusting them. But it also means equipping them to be ready to accept that trust. Ensure the business has the direction and the culture of cohesion and collaborative greatness that will help it truly reach brand new peaks.