Every leader’s mission should be to create an environment where everyone is continually striving to improve their performance and output. We live in an ever-changing world. If businesses are not continuing to evolve and improve, competitors and market forces will negatively impact them. It is about individuals, teams, and companies getting better every day, improving performance.
How Managers Improve Employee Performance
It starts with hiring the right people. If you don’t have the right people, then your ability to execute is severely hampered. You need to be able to tell employees what to do and, most importantly, why. Showing them how to it while giving feedback on how they are doing will improve performance. As a leader, you need to make supporting your team one of the primary missions. Getting obstacles or roadblocks out of their way is key to be a successful manager too. Lastly, asking for feedback from all employees regularly on process improvement opportunities is a must. Who knows better what’s working well or not, but the people doing the work?
Ways to Help With Improving Performance
- Accept mistakes and use them as learning opportunities
- Help develop action plans for improvement
- Seek to educate rather than assist
- Provide meaningful feedback for learning
- Encourage continual improvement
- Actively listen and show genuine interest
- Recognize and reward small wins and improvements
- Model the behaviors you desire
- Ask questions to help discover sources of problems
You Get What You Expect
It has been said that what teachers expect from students is what they essentially get back. The same holds for managers and leaders with their employees. If you think of expectations as a self-fulfilling prophecy, you will often see how you expect someone to act causes that person to do so. Managers get the performance that they expect from people. When you pump up someone saying that they can accomplish a task, they usually will. If you say that someone can’t do something, whether you say it to them or not by even making them feel like they can’t, they won’t deliver. Leaders who expect more get more often.
Coaching Is Paramount
Improving performance can only happen with quality coaching. All team members need to develop a growth mindset, where one assumes that people can learn. As a coach, you need to ask questions more than telling, aiming for a ratio of 4:1. Help your team help themselves without giving them all the answers.
Strategy: Who, How, And Why?
Help your team achieve peak performance by selecting a task that they are good at, that they like to do, and that adds value. You should know all your employees’ skills and interests so that you can leverage and deploy people to their (and your) ultimate advantage. But before asking more of your people, consider the following:
- Are they operating at the sweet spot of what they like, what they are good at, and what adds value?
- Are they ultimately engaged in the work?
If so, then proceed. Performance can be improved under the right conditions. Strategically determining who does what and why is key to your success, helping to improve performance.
