Your group is great. It works at the highest efficiency and responds to every situation with lightning speed. When more work needs to be done, your team members can step in and out of each other’s roles quickly and smoothly, right?
Even if this doesn’t fit your team right now, you can take heart in the fact that it might soon.
Whether you’re a new team leader or a manager with years of experience, developing your team is an important part of your job. It’s not just for new hires, either. Humans need training and help throughout their careers, both on their own and as part of a team, to improve their skills and keep working well.
If you work for a small or medium-sized company, you might be the recruiter, the trainer, and the team leader. You can do your best in each of these roles with the help of the resources in this article. If you work for a big company, chances are the HR or Learning and Development department will help your team learn and grow.
As a manager, you are in a great position to understand how your people work, figure out what training they need to do their jobs better, and work closely with HR or L&D to get the right training to the right person at the right time.
In this article, we’ll look at a few different aspects of team development and talk about some tips and tools that can help you get the most out of your people and achieve your goals.
Finding Out What Training Is Needed
When you’re trying to build your team, it can be hard to know where to start. Start by finding out what your team members need to grow. Talk to them, talk about and update their job descriptions, and watch them work.
Often, all you have to do is ask the right questions to find out where your team lacks knowledge or skills. What is the most important thing a person does? And what is the biggest problem with your team’s performance?
This is especially helpful if your place of work doesn’t have a system for regularly evaluating and improving people’s performance. If your team members aren’t used to having their work evaluated and improved in this way, they might see it as a bad sign about how skilled they are. Gathering specific information about what they need to do well in their jobs will help them feel good about their development. While some standards, such as cyber security training retain a great amount of importance and relevance for any team, sometimes you may wish to personalize your regimen a little more.
A Training Needs Assessment can help you figure out who needs to improve their skills and what kind of training would be best for them. This will let you choose training for the people in need in a targeted way. After all, Excel training for one team member who is having difficulty with spreadsheets might be a waste of time for other team members who have different needs. However, cyber training could benefit the entire team.
Choosing The Best Ways To Train
Now that you know what your people need to work on, you can choose the right training for them. However, it can be hard to find the right balance between different ways of learning that will work for everyone.
The 70:20:10 model, for example, says that 70 per cent of learning happens through experience, like doing daily tasks, 20 per cent through conversations with other people, like coaching, and 10 per cent through traditional training courses. Here, you need to give people the chance to use the skills they need to improve, talk to more experienced practitioners about them, and then give them the right training.
Coaching
It’s important to remember that many performance gaps should be closed not with a training program but with better communication. You can coach your team members by having private, casual conversations with them one-on-one. Having these talks with people on a regular basis will help you find and deal with a wide range of problems, from helping people achieve their goals to fixing problems with their performance. You should also make it a regular habit to give your people a lot of feedback. It would also be beneficial to take advantage of the wide range of coaching courses on offer to everyone from managers, to new employees. Performance gaps can be filled, as coaching heightens awareness of communication and language, personal and professional strengths, as well as areas to develop, opportunities and potential.
Activities To Build A Team
Team building exercises can be a fun and useful way to help people work together better and find out what their strengths and weaknesses are. If you decide to do one, you should choose the exercise very carefully to make sure it helps you reach your training goal.
Before you choose an exercise, you should figure out what your team’s biggest problems are. By doing this, you can make sure that the event is more than just a nice day away from the office. For example, if you’ve noticed that your team makes mistakes or misses deadlines when they don’t communicate well, you might choose exercises that improve important communication skills like listening, empathy, and speaking up.
Some team-building activities help develop creativity and leadership skills, while others help your team get better at solving problems and planning and strategizing.
Giving Out Work
Your team can also be stronger if you know how to delegate well. You might be nervous about giving someone else control of your projects and tasks, but you can’t do everything yourself. And the people on your team need chances to learn new skills and get more experience.
If you haven’t given your team tasks that they could do, make a list of your most important tasks and delegate the ones at the bottom of the list. As your people get more skilled, they can move up the list.
You will need to manage the process well to get the best results for your people when you delegate. Give a task to another team member and help them succeed by giving them support and direction as they work on it. If you don’t, your team members might not want to work with you on other projects in the future.
When you delegate well, you can focus on making your own work more valuable. Taking on a new challenge will make your people feel more confident and in charge. (Take our quiz to find out how well you can delegate.)
Planning For The Future
Once you know what your team members can do and how well they do it, you can make plans so that you don’t lose important skills and knowledge if someone leaves. Good succession planning makes sure that people teach their colleagues their skills, experience, and knowledge before they leave. Managing these changes and being ready for them will help you deal with the changes better.
If some people on your team have jobs that are so important that if they were sick for a day, everything would fall apart, it might be a good idea to teach them how to do each other’s jobs. This will give you a flexible group of people who can step in and help each other at any time.
Key Points
A good team doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. There are many things you can do to make sure your team does well.
It starts with giving each team member clear roles that will help them stay on track and achieve their goals. By watching them at work, you can figure out their strengths and weaknesses and give them training that fits the way they learn. You can send your employees to training courses, but you can also coach them to help them learn.
Team activities can also help people on your team get to know each other better and build trust. Help them gain skills and experience by giving them some of your work to do, and make sure everyone can do work by training them to do each other’s jobs.