Maximising the performance of you and your team
Within a small business, it is essential that the whole team is operating at maximum performance to utilise the best use of time, money and resources.
So what motivates you and your team members to achieve excellent results?
What gives you and your team that little buzz at the end of the day?
It's important you are doing what you want to do and that you recruit a team with the right motivations, which is inline with what you want them to achieve. Individuals will achieve their maximum performance if they are motivated, and their motivation lies in their own ambitions.
It is therefore important that you and your team have a clear idea of your motivations and ambitions so you can work towards achieving it.
People are motivated by different things, and it's important these are identified and aligned with yourself and your company's ambitions to get to where you want to be.
Consider the following range of motivations and identify those which apply to yourself and your team?
- Finanical Reward - to increase their salary
- Personal Profile - to be seen as an expert
- Company Profile - to work for a well known brand
- Social Impact - to meet social or enviromental need
- Recognition - to receive praise and positive feedback
- Competitive - to increase the market share of your company
- Creative - developing and executing new ideas
- Perfection - refining processes and systems to completion
- Performance - winning work and meeting sales targets
- Assisting - supporting and being useful to others in the team
- Family - working to support your family
- Solutions - finding solutions to challenges
- Responsibility - having the authority to lead and project manage
- Learning - having the ability to develop skills and knowledge
- and there are probably more......
How can you measure whether these motivations are being fulfiled? Are you and your team actually achieving your ambitions and getting the buzz you need?
Let's look at defining your ambitions for 2009 in relation to the different motivations you have identified. Have a think about the following
- What would you like people to be saying about you or your company in a year's time?
- What would you be doing that gives you the buzzy feeling inside?
- What would you like to see in a year's time?
This exercise can be really valuable to reinvigorate your team, to help define and fulfil ambitions, to move individuals into a different role, or even to change a member of the team if they are no longer aligned to what you need.
By Heather Wilkinson, Striding Out Business Coach
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