6 Tips To Help Your Team Grow And Develop

As a business owner, executive, or manager, you’re responsible for more than just yourself. You have a personal and professional obligation to invest in the people on your team. More specifically you must invest in their development as employees (and as people). The question is, do you know how?

How To Set Your Employees Up For Growth

Every employee is different. No two individuals have the same personal or professional goals. In this regard, your team is quite diverse. Thus, there’s no magic button you can press to take your employees from where they are to where you want them to be. There are, however, proven principles that, when properly layered together, can increase your odds of producing the desired result.

In light of this, let’s explore some of the different strategies you can use to nudge your team toward growth and help them develop into better people and professionals that add value to everyone around them.

1. Hold Yourself To A High Standard

It all starts with you. You can’t ask or expect anything from anyone if you aren’t willing to do it yourself. When it comes to learning, growth, and skill development, you must hold yourself to a high standard. Show a commitment to learning and improvement, and your team will be more likely to do the same.

2. Invest In Training

World-class training has never been more accessible or convenient. Look at any field, industry, or profession and you’ll notice that learning resources are exploding.

Take real estate as an example. You can now complete an entire real estate license course online without ever walking into a classroom. Even the digital marketing space is full of value-adding online courses and programs.

Learning has been democratized, and you’d be wise to leverage this shift to empower your team with high-quality training. We’re not saying you need to fill up their calendars with pointless trainings – quality of training is always more important than quantity – but you should identify areas where you can inject high-value courses and workshops into their quarterly rhythms.

3. Give Them Responsibility

You can train your team all you want, but it ultimately comes down to action. As any professional knows, you can learn more in six months of being thrown into the fire than you can in four years of business school.

While it can be messy at times, giving your employees more responsibility will ultimately help them develop at a much faster rate.

4. Ask Lots Of Questions

Very few people mature and develop at an efficient rate when they’re simply told what to do. If you want to get the most out of your people, you have to engage them on an intellectual level. In other words, make them consider the who, what, when, where, why, and how behind everything they’re doing. The best way to do this is by asking lots of questions.

Questions are obviously situation-specific, but here are some examples of good questions that can spark productive conversations and subsequent actions:

• How would you describe what you did?
• What is working well for you right now? What is not working well for you?
• What do you think is really happening?
• What have you already tried?
• What could the first step be?
• What is the best/worst option?
• If anything were possible, what would you do in this situation?

The key to good questions is to listen. Stop thinking about the next question and focus on their answer to the one you just asked. What they say (or don’t say) will reveal a lot about where further growth is needed.

5. Create Mentoring Programs

Some of the best growth comes in one-on-one situations. If you have a sizable team with enough internal resources, creating a mentoring program is one way to help your younger team members mature and develop.(Likewise, this sort of relationship forces the mentor to embrace more leadership and cultivate some of the skills that are required to guide others.)

6. Recognize Growth And Accomplishments

Finally, create a culture where growth and accomplishments are recognized and lauded. (It doesn’t need to be financial.) When people feel like they’re rewarded for their personal and professional development, they’re more apt to keep investing in themselves. And this sort of mentality is contagious.

Empower Your Team

People are your greatest asset – not your products, processes, or intellectual property. And if you want to set your business up for long-term success, it’s imperative that you invest in your employees. By prioritizing their development, you ultimately set your organization up to be more efficient, more profitable, and more successful.