Your team is amazing. It works at the highest level of efficiency and reacts responsively at lightning speed in every situation. At times where additional effort is required, your team members step in and out of one another's roles deftly and at a moment's notice… right?
If this is not an accurate description of your team right now, you'll be encouraged to know that it could be very soon.
Developing your team is an important part of your job, whether you're a new team leader or an experienced manager. And it doesn't apply only to new hires. People need training and support throughout their careers – both as individuals and as teams – to develop their skills and to continue to work effectively.
As a manager/ leader you are in a great position to know how your people work, to identify what development activities they need to perform better, and to work closely with HR and P&D to deliver the right support to the right people at the right time.
Let’s look at several areas of team development and explore some practical tips and tools to help you get the best out of your people and achieve your objectives.
Identifying Training Needs
The hardest part of developing your team can be knowing where to begin. Start by understanding your team members' developmental needs. Review and update their job descriptions, ask them to fill out the self-evaluation, they can choose which subjects to assessment themselves against but always starting with Technical Competence , talk to them, and watch them work give regular feedback.
Often, just asking the right questions can reveal knowledge and skill gaps in your team. For example, what is the key part of a person's performance management – that is a system of regularly appraising and improving people's performance. If your team members are not used to having their performance appraised and developed in this way, they may view it as a negative judgment of their competency. Gathering specific information about what they need to be successful in their roles will help them to feel positive about developing themselves.
You can use the self-evaluation to help both you and your team member to understand which key skills need to be developed and what kind of development is right for them. This will allow you to select development activities in a targeted way for the people who really need it.
Choosing the Right Methods
Now that you've identified areas where your people can improve, you can choose training to suit their needs. However, finding the right balance between different ways of learning that will suit everyone can be a challenge.
The 70:20:10 model, for example, suggests that 70 percent of learning happens through experience, such as daily tasks; 20 percent through conversations with other people, such as coaching; and 10 percent through traditional training courses. Here, you need to give people the opportunity to use the skills they need to develop, discuss them with more experienced practitioners, and then train appropriately.
Some of the more common ways to improve people's skills is in the flow of work, or otherwise known as on the job, where someone works alongside a more experienced colleague; Instructor let more formal workshop style where whole groups can be taught in a group setting; and Active Training, which uses games and role-playing to keep learners engaged.
Coaching
It's worth bearing in mind that many performance gaps should be closed with better communication and coaching rather than with a training program. You can coach your team members by having confidential and relaxed one-on-one conversations with them in their open blend sessions.
Having these conversations regularly will help you to identify and deal with a range of issues effectively, from helping people achieve their goals to addressing performance problems.
Specific coaching models, such as GROW which is embedded in open blend allow you to do this. GROW stands for Goal, Reality, Options, and Will, and creates a structure for your discussion. T will give you question prompts to fully develop your team members goals and consider the many different options available.
You should also ensure that you give your people plenty of feedback as a matter of routine.
There are loads of resources to help you team learn or develop skills in KnowHow, but these should not be assigned in isolation. You should have a briefing with your team member before undertaking any learning activities to discuss what they want to get out of the learning and how it fits in with their overall development plan.
Once a module or course of learning has been competed you again need to have a conversation about what they have learned and how are they going to put it into practice. In most cases you will need to give build on the content giving specifics relating to their brand or role, ensuring relevance to their specific situation is clear.
You need to then observe that skill in practice and give them encouragement and feedback. If you have any of the modules in the Initiate or Enhance collection as part of the team’s development, we have created handy manager guides for you with suggest follow up coaching activities
contained here https://gladis.litmoseu.com/admin/Collections/ContentIndex/720 in Knowhow.
Team Building Activities
Team building exercises can be fun and effective ways to improve teamwork and identify people's strengths and weaknesses. If you decide to run one, you should select the exercise very carefully, so that it meets your training objective.
It's important to identify your team's biggest challenges before you choose an exercise. By doing this, you can ensure that the event is more than just a nice day out of the office. For example, if you have noticed that poor communication has led to your team making mistakes or missing deadlines, you may want to select exercises that improve essential communication skills like listening, empathy, and verbalization.
Some team building activities encourage creativity and develop leadership, while others strengthen problem-solving abilities and build your team's planning and strategy skills.
Tip:
Pick an activity that you will be comfortable joining in with. Your team may be looking to you to set the expectations for the exercise, and to model the behaviours you want to develop.
Delegating Work
Effective delegation can also strengthen your team. You may feel nervous about handing over responsibility for your projects and tasks business to someone else, but you don't have time to do everything yourself. And your team members need opportunities to learn new skills and gain experience.
If you have not delegated tasks that your team has the potential to perform, make a list prioritizing your most important tasks and delegate those at the lower end. Your people can work their way up the list as they gain experience.
When you delegate, you will need to manage the process well to achieve the best outcome for your people. Hand over a task carefully and help the team member who takes it on to succeed, by giving them support and guidance to complete it. Otherwise, your team members may not want to take on other tasks in the future.
When you delegate successfully, you can focus on adding value with your own work. Taking on a new challenge will improve your people's confidence and give them a great sense of empowerment.
Tip:
Mastering the art of delegation promotes trust within a team and is just one of the key skills of managers who use a transformational style of leadership.
This approach will help you to connect with your team members, set clear goals, and be an example of integrity and fairness. It allows you to develop a team that is highly motivated and consistently achieving its individual and shared goals.
Project Work/ Cross Training/ Job Shadowing
If your team member has highlighted a new area of the business of new skill or role that they want to develop and it’s not something you are the subject matter expert in, contact the leader of the business sector that is and ask for their support. If you can agree a specific project that stretches your team member or arrange a job shadowing session this way, they can have exposure to different areas of the business which are not in their usual day to day remit which expands their commercial knowledge as a whole and it can not only develop them into new and interesting areas but strengthen your team too. Many promotions have been secured by completing these stretch tasks / projects.
It’s vital that you have an open mind when looking at ways to develop the team. Variety is key, it must be in line with your team members development goals.
Succession Planning
Once you have identified your team members' abilities and performance levels, you can put plans in place so that you don't lose vital skills and knowledge if any of them decide to move on. Good succession planning ensures that individuals pass on their skills, experience, and knowledge to their colleagues well before they leave. Being prepared and managing these transitions will help you to deal with the change more easily.
If you have people on your team with roles so essential that even a day's illness would throw everything into chaos, it may be advisable to cross-train your team members in one another's responsibilities. This will provide you with a flexible team that can step in and help one another at a moment's notice.
Key Points
An effective team doesn't come into existence by accident. There are lots of things you can do to make your team a high-performing one.
It begins with clearly defined roles for your team members that will help keep them on track and achieve their targets. Observing them at work will identify their strengths and weaknesses and will enable you to match training to their learning styles. As well as signing your people up to training courses, you can get involved in their learning by coaching them.
You can also help your team members get to know one another better and build trust with team activities. Help to develop their skills and experience by delegating some of your tasks, and by ensuring that everyone can take on tasks by cross-training them in one another's roles.
Before you have a development conversation with your team member, we suggest you watch two one demand modules which can be found in the Inspire Collection in KnowHow.
Inspire - Talent Enablement - effective 121s.
Inspire - Talent Enablement – the Development Conversation
the fastest way to find these modules is to click on the learning hub and search for TE5.
You can also click here to view the A-Z of learning to help you spark some ideas of ways to develop your team.
