Sunday, February 27, 2011

Lead your team by demonstrating your top results

With much of the early work for the year behind us, it's time for the leaders to ensure their team works through and gets the top results you know they can deliver. In our last post we looked a putting a plan together to review and keep on top of the major goals throughout the team.

The next step in this plan is to ensure that our team results are visible to our bosses and their bosses.

How to do this is relatively straight forward if we follow these basic steps.

 First discuss you team goals with your boss, as leaders of our teams it's important for us to keep our goals and their progress in the face of our bosses. Be sure to show how the work will progress across the year and the interim gaols along the way.

Next build your self a short traffic light report, highlighting each of these goals and a flag to quickly show their state, ahead of plan, on plan, behind plan, in need of assistance to get back on track.

As each month draws to a close update your traffic light report to demonstrate how well the team is  travelling towards achieving these goals.

Often as leaders we are so focussed on doing a great job we fail to demonstrate to the rest of the business what a great team we have. We can address this through some positive PR.

Send you report each month to your boss and "CC"  all those that your team interact with.

By sending this report each month your team's performance will be seen across the organisation. As your team achieves each of its goals, then you can add a note in what a great job they have done. The visibility of your team achieving and exceeding their goals across the wider team will keep your team in the spotlight. Their excellent work will keep your team morale high and performing well as others comment on how well they tackle and achieve their goals.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Steps to help team members achieve their goals

The year is well and truly on the way and the economy is looking a little brighter. As leaders who want our teams to succeed, now is the time to take action and put a plan in place to help your team members get their goals.
Set aside some time to look at your ten most important goals, these will have been spread across your team earlier in the year when you set each members individual goals.

Identify who is taking the lead on each of these ten goals. Send them a quick mail and offer them a 30 minute meeting in two weeks time to assess their plan and action points to meet these goals. Mark each of these meetings in your calendar and add a task for your self the day before to spend 30 minutes of your own time thinking through the goal, its steps and what the outcome should be each three months.

Next assign a time in your schedule in June and September to review each of these goals with your team member.

Do your homework when you come to this scheduled time in your calendar, create your own outline of how you see this goal progressing and try to assess how you can make an impact to help at various stages. Note down the subsequent meetings.

At the appointed meeting time, have your team member take you through their action plan and their interim check progress goals along the way. Take care not to take over, however offer advice where you think their plan is weakest. Be sure to ask them what assistance you can offer. By the end of this meeting your team member will know you are watching the progress of their work and more importantly you are willing to buy in and offer help.

By engaging with your members and offering to assisting them with their goals, your team will see their leaders are committed to their success and will drive themselves to do the best they can.