An experienced business coach, executive coach, mentor and sales effectiveness trainer, Ratish Pandey, works with clients globally. Ratish Pandey, Founder, Ethique Advisory, has the precedence of working closely with his coachees to design and execute complex strategic plans that require action and change. A passionate, result-driven person who loves to work with people, he is adept at building trust with his Coachees. To help clients realize their true potential, he tailors his coaching incorporating their motivational triggers. Armed with proven growth strategies from the world’s #1 business coaching company – ActionCOACH – Ratish adopts a warm and engaging outcome-focused approach. He addresses both business challenges and personal goal achievement for his clients. Bringing a fresh viewpoint to the table and positive conversations are his hallmark.
“Show me a successful business raking in a large number of profits, and I’ll show you a high-performing team doing all the magic behind the scenes.”
You’ve probably heard the saying that people are the biggest assets of any business. This statement is unarguably true because the success of any business hinges largely on the performance of its team.
Every other factor matters, too, like the use of up-to-date tools and equipment, pricing model, advertising strategy, business environment, economic policies, and so on, but the impact of your team performance on business profits cannot be overemphasized.
Regardless of its size, every business requires a high-performing team to drive the daily activities for success.
In other words, when recruiting a team for your business, the focus is to get skills on board that would contribute to helping a business grow and be profitable.
One thing that every business has in common is a team.
The team may consist of family, friends, Freelancers, Temp staff, and maybe a few full-timers for a small business.
A mid-sized business or large corporation would have many full-time employees with a healthy mix of temporary staff.
Irrespective of the business and team size, as a business owner, you need to pay more attention to your team members, as their performance determines the company’s performance both in the short and long term.
So, for the team efforts to align to the business goals and objectives, they need to understand the goals and objectives of the business.
Again, you can either have a low or high-performing team in any business. Developing a high-performing team enables you to maximize profitability and helps your business to reach a new point of success.
To build a high performing team, it starts with hiring RIGHT.
Do not be in a rush to fill the vacancy. You need a person with the skills that fit your company values and the existing team. Finding the right skills is not the challenge; finding the right FIT is.
Remember, values cannot be changed, but skills can be imparted.
While A players are a must to create a winning team, the steady and consistent ones are needed to keep the company’s wheels chugging. It is consistency that helps win the race.
Establish expectations. From day one, make sure the employee has clarity of his job and role. Set clear expectations on deliverables and performance. Have a metric to measure performance and share it with the employee—set ground rules. Communicate the company values to help the new team members understand what they have signed up for.
Once Hired and inducted, the next step is employee engagement. Only when an employee is engaged will they take ownership, and only once the employee takes ownership will the results come through.
Two things are needed for employee engagement: One, creating an environment that encourages all to work cohesively together towards a common goal. Building a solid team requires efforts that help create bonds and connections among the team members, across groups & cross hierarchies. It requires open lines of communication across departments and hierarchies, tools to communicate with employees regularly to keep them updated and make them feel like a part of the family, planning skills, employee motivation and employee collaboration. Introducing initiatives that get people across functions to collaborate is one step. It helps employees understand the challenges of other job functions, inculcates respect among employees, and promotes cross-learning while creating bonding among employees.
Two, create a learning culture that encourages employees to stay updated on their skills, upskill and grow. While initiatives may be galore in an organization, they become lip service if they are not part of the culture and employees do not participate. Hence, while available, these programs need to be supported by actions that ensure the employees engage and benefit from them.
Walk the Talk employees follow actions more than words. For best results as a manager, your words and action should match for employees to emulate the right behaviour. Model the change in behaviour you want to see.
Adopt EQ in staff management. Each employee comes from a different background with specific strengths and areas of improvement. A good manager needs to recognize and understand that to guide each to discover their potential. It could reflect a person’s responsibilities, the learning program they are encouraged to enrol for, or the motivation extended to them. All in all, it’s about setting the employee up for success. By embracing the realities of different work styles and different forms of motivation, an effective leader will treat individual differences as an asset, not an obstacle.
Rewards & recognition: All look for affirmation of a good job done. to create a unified culture, especially in a fast-growing company, this becomes an important tool to encourage value consistency across the organization. Recognition tools need to promote following the company values recognize individual achievements & group achievements. It is important to remember it’s not only sales that need recognition. Other functions are equally imperative, and the employees across the organization seek recognition.
The last element is Empowerment. It is the people on the ground that face the issues. Empower them to take decisions. It encourages ownership, reduces turnaround time for a resolution and reduces escalation improves customer service and lo, behold, you gain on all accounts – employee engagement, customer engagement and service delivery points.
For effective Empowerment of employees, several things need to be in place. Training accompanied with an SOP laying out the guidelines to manage the situation within the company value set. Finally, trust them to take the right decision.
To summarize, only if you have a team with shared values, shared goals, engaged, takes ownership with a passion for winning is when you have a team rearing to go and a company that will have no choice but to grow.
It is no wonder that “You are only as good as your team.”