Almost every manager or employer on the planet will agree that team building is hard—especially if you don’t have a solid plan.
The good news: Understanding how to unlock your team’s potential is a skill that managers and entrepreneurs can learn. Better yet, it’s a skill that offers you immediate—and often significant productivity.
Here are the six best ways to unlock your team’s potential:
1. Create friendship bonds
One of the most important ingredients in a productive team is the ability to empathize and keep track of what other people feel, know and believe
In other words, your team’s potential hinges on an understanding of their perspectives. That means you might need to invest in knowing your team members better. This can make a huge difference.
2. Encourage collaborations
Having employees put in concerted efforts makes them work more than twice as fast, with fewer mistakes, and better results.
Additionally, when people are paired up, they learn to communicate more easily and often, and to share challenges and solutions—all of which increases overall information flow and team alignment.
3. Recognise each member’s contribution
Regularly recognize each person’s contribution to the overall goal and purpose . As a manager, you must have a system to make sure that your team members feel included. Make sure to recognize progress privately, but also in public ways, such as callouts during staff meetings.
Forging team cohesiveness and unlocking its potential requires effort. But it can be done, and when it’s done right, your close-knit, efficient team will thank you.
4. Ensure your team stops switch-tasking
Usually, people confuse “multitasking” with “switch-tasking” – performing two or more tasks at the same time is practically impossible physically, what we actually do is quickly switching between them. However, the truth is, each time you start a new task, you need up to about 25 minutes to concentrate again.
It is also important to understand that team productivity is rooted in individual productivity. If you can nail this down in place by helping team member avoid switching roles frequently, the rest will follow.
5. Implement realistic deadlines
Most people tend to thrive under pressure, but too much pressure can break anyone. So it is imperative to keep things carefully balanced.
How do you carefully balanced pressure? Well, it’s the fine line that a leader /manager must draw between achieving productivity and undermining performance. To keep your team’s work at peak performance, you need to have the right kind of stimuli to achieve that.
6. Promote individual achievements
In the end, we all are humans. We all have some desire to express, to be heard, and encouraged. Many managers ignore this basic fact. You need to encourage. You need to promote.
So if a team member is achieving something for not just himself/herself, but for the team, you must encourage him/her on that basis. Doing this will sharpen your managerial skills and help them do their jobs more effectively. If suppose they make a mistake, never criticize them in front of other people, but tell them in isolation.
Isn’t it interesting that you can increase productivity significantly by unlocking your team’s potentials? We bet, it is. Tell us what you think in the comments.
