As Peter Drucker famously pointed out, culture will eat strategy for breakfast, so it’s important to engage your entire team in what you’re trying to achieve. Here’s how you can engage your team to grow your business.
- Start by getting your team’s input into the future vision for the business. Ask them for their ideas for making things better (and do this regularly).
- Review your meeting structure. Are your meetings focused on helping you achieve your objectives, or are they just ticking boxes? How can you re-energise your weekly, monthly, and quarterly meetings with the team? Perhaps you could bring departments together to improve communication, or ask people to prepare thoroughly before meetings to help everyone get more from them?
- Let each team member know how they can contribute to the success of the business. Set clear individual goals, aligned with your strategic objectives. Does each person know whether they’ve had a good month or not? How do they measure it?
- Don’t wait until the end of the year to review performance with your team. Meet monthly or quarterly to talk about how each person is doing, what they need to improve on, and how you can help them to be the best they can be. They will get loads from it, and so will you.
- Make sure everyone in your team has a personal development plan and is working to achieve things on it (this includes you, by the way). Research we conducted earlier this year showed that those businesses that invested in training and development performed better than those that didn’t.
- Create a feedback culture – an environment where people feel comfortable giving feedback to help make the business better. Reading Radical Candour, by Kim Scott will help you do this.
