If you want a successful team, you should start supporting individuals

A team as a whole is only as strong as its weakest link. Success depends on both effective cooperation of individual team members and their individual productivity and motivation. The road to success of the whole team is through training, motivation and empowerment of individual employees because if the team does not sufficiently use the individual talents of the team members, it may never reach its full potential. Here are four tips on how you as a manager can support overall team performance by supporting its individual members.

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Give employees sufficient power

As Harvard Business Review states, first of all you must allow individual team members sufficient manoeuvring space for their own initiatives, ideas and decisions. Therefore, you should give employees sufficient power and avoid micro-managing their everyday work.

Support individual talent in your employees

Employees each have their own individual strengths and talents. Not only should you use these strengths within the whole team but also support these individual talents in a systemic and long-term manner through training and motivation.

Support healthy self-confidence in team members

Even the best hard skills will not be of much use if your employees do not have sufficient self-confidence and willingness to push through their ideas and suggestions. It is typical that within a team, some members are louder and more energetic, while others are quieter and have less sharp elbows. Unfortunately, confidence is not always distributed according to skills. You should thus support employees so they are not afraid to voice the opinions they firmly believe in.

Motivate and inspire employees according to their individual needs and values

All team members should share a single vision and participate equally in the effort to reach the common goals of the whole team. But people are motivated by different means, which is why you should motivate and inspire employees on an individual level, for instance at regular assessment meetings with team members.

 

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Article source Harvard Business Review - flagship magazine of Harvard Business School
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