Do You Want to Build a Great Team? Here’s How to Do It…
You have a business, you employ people, and you are having issues around finding, managing, and keeping good employees, or at least getting them motivated enough to produce the sort of work that you want and expect.
A bad attitude, or interpersonal issues can be a real problem in your business as can disinterest. Employees like this are poorly motivated, and do not enjoy their work.
Those who do just enough to not get sacked, they are the ones that will kill your business. And if this is the case with you, then clearly, you really need to do something about it.
If you have these sorts of issues in your business, it is costing you money, I can guarantee it. Because, when businesses go broke, it happens slowly.
It is different from business to business, of course. But for many owners and managers, the focus is on structure and systems, but not necessarily on how people fit within those systems.
Chances are, you do not have a roadmap for creating a sustainable people strategy. And the result of not doing so can be quite devastating.
What are the costs of not looking after this area in your business? An obvious one is morale. And if people are not chosen well, engaged, managed properly, they may not do so well. They are not a good fit for you or the job.
These can affect the overall morale of the organization, and that results in higher staff turnover. If you are having to constantly replace people in your business, that is a huge cost that must be covered.
You must go through the whole recruitment process repeatedly. New people need to be trained, which takes time and money, and while that is happening, what are you losing out on in terms of sales and customer service? It is a big problem.
What does it do to your culture? How do you define culture? Simply put, it is “the way we do things around here”. That starts with you as a leader, it really does. Don’t you think that your business outcomes will be drastically affected as well?
Obviously, that means that you are leaving a lot of money on the table, a lot of money, profit.
So, you have people problems. But now that you are aware of them, are these really problems? Or an opportunity?
The door is slightly open. And the question is, are you willing to go through it and do what you need to do to make things better for your business?
Well, where does it start?
You see, technical experts, or sales experts, or any experts within their field, are not necessarily leaders. I see an awful lot of people who are exceptionally good at their job, being promoted into positions where they are expected to manage people, but do not have the necessary qualities to be able to do that effectively.
The fact is, a quick Google search will show you that bad bosses cost billions of dollars per year. People really do leave people, not businesses. So, if they are not being managed properly, that can cause huge issues.
This begs the question, how competent are you as a leader? Well, you need to diagnose the situation, starting with you. How do you know that you have the strengths you need as a leader, in terms of your behaviours? Which ones are you able to use for the benefit of your team? And what untapped strengths are you unaware of in you, and your team?
These are important questions. And if you can find a solution, it will have the potential to make a dramatic difference.
Not only are analytics important through the rest of your business, for key performance indicators and other measures, they are equally important when it comes to your people, they will give you deeper insight, which will enable you to be a far more effective leader.
The Harrison Assessment enables us to look deeply into people’s motivations, how they work, how they behave and how they interact with other people.
This helps predict performance and potential.
What we measure is valid for the whole of the employee lifecycle. This scientific study: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-data-beats-intuition-at-making-selection-decisions/
shows that data analytics beats intuition by 50% at making effective selection decisions. It is well worth reading.
What are behavioural analytics? Well, within Harrison Assessments, we quantify people’s interests, preferences, and behavioural tendencies. We measure 175 different traits and factors related to work, personality, motivations etc.
It can be used to find people’s potential in any business at all levels and allows leaders to measure risks, potential, and development needs throughout the company.
Extremely valuable information.
Do you know or have you heard of the Pareto Principle or Pareto Distribution? What this means is that if you look at a group of people doing productive work, say 10 salespeople. Roughly 50% of the output will be produced by three members of that team. Now that is scary stuff, which means that seven or eight people are not pulling their weight. Now, if that is happening, the big question is, can this be improved?
Before we answer that question, though, let us just have a look at what is involved in somebody doing specific work within a business.
There are two sides to the equation. What you CAN do in a job relates to training, qualifications, education level, knowledge of the job or industry, work experience and skills.
But the other part that I want to focus on is, do they WANT to do the job?
And what comes into play here are elements of personality, motivation, interpersonal skills, task, and work environment preferences. If you can get these two areas to match up, then the likelihood of this person doing well in the job is going to increase markedly.
Having a way of predicting how well a candidate will perform in any role is really a game changer. The Harrison job analysis does exactly that. We benchmark the traits that differentiates them from the rest and create a job formula.
The resulting Job Success Analysis tells us how well the person scores on the traits and factors that are critical to success within that job.
It is a remarkably simple, quick way of identifying who is likely to do well in the position. Of course, you still must do all the other checks as well, that goes with the territory. But if you do this, your chances of identifying someone who is suitable for you and the job is that much greater.
So, are strong traits really strengths?
Every trait can be a strength or a derailer, depending on whether the trait is balanced by another seemingly opposite, or paradoxical trait.
In this example, the person is strong in both frankness and diplomacy. Both will be genuinely balancing strengths when communicating. However, if a person is strong in only one of the paradoxical traits, there will necessarily be a related counterproductive behaviour, the strength of which depends on the extent of the imbalance.
For example, a person with strong frankness and weak diplomacy would have a strong tendency to be disruptively, blunt, which leads to unnecessary upsets mistrust and employee turnover.
Conversely, a person with strong diplomacy and weak frankness will have a strong tendency to be evasive when communicating, causing unclarity and unresolved issues. In some cases, the person is weak in both frankness and diplomacy, showing they will try to avoid communication.
The key is to appreciate and strengthen both sides of the paradox.
Using the insight gained from these reports will give you great insight into you, your team and organization. It will also help with recruitment screening, engagement, analytics, career and leadership development, and individual and team coaching.
So, you can see that we cover off on most areas to do with people management within any organization. It makes sense then, that effective recruitment, engagement, and development within your organization is going to produce a high performing team.
How do we go about doing that? Well, to get inspired staff, we first need to recruit people with the right behaviours for the position and the right values, do they match the values of the organization?
You could start by assessing what makes your high performers different from the rest and look for people with similar strengths.
What are the needs of the person compared to the needs of the organization? When there is a good match between the person and the organization and they have earned the right through superior performance, then we can then look at getting a joint commitment to provide a career path moving forward.
Give them something to aim at, show them that you care, show them that you want them to develop not only themselves but the company. And this leads to a realization of their potential, which of course means that you are growing your team in the right sort of way.
Doing that creates a vacuum behind for the same thing to happen again. In this manner, over time, you develop a high performing team.
Because the Harrison assessment is wide and deep in its applications, this becomes the knot that ties recruitment, engagement, and employee development together. It is the way forward for all aspects of people management within your organization.
