How to Develop Your Team Members for Consistent Growth

If you want to effectively grow your business, you need three important things in place: a solid business plan, strong systems, and a team of great people. The business plan provides the foundation and the systems provide the structure, but your team members are the people who will act daily to get things done and drive your business forward. It’s essential to develop your team so they’re ready for consistent growth!

As you grow, you’ll discover that there are a lot of moving parts and new things to handle, and you’ll need the help of your team to keep things running smoothly. If they’re not prepared to handle that growth, you could end up having to pick up the slack – or worse, your company could be affected by the bottlenecks that can result.

Developing your team takes intentional work and consistency, but it doesn’t have to be difficult. By building relationships and checking in regularly with your team, you can more easily keep up with what they need – and by putting a few systems in place, you can track their development and ensure they’re equipped to help you grow!

Building Relationships with Your Team

Not very long ago, team members were often considered as cogs in a machine: they came to work, performed their duties, and went home. Things ran as planned, companies grew as planned, and most people expected nothing more.

Things have changed very quickly over the past decade or so. Technology has allowed teams to become remote (and oftentimes, international), requiring different management techniques and culture building processes. Most companies have moved at least partially online, which means that the customer journey has changed (and so have the requirements on your service departments).

Whether your company is fully in-house, hybrid, or fully virtual, it’s important to build relationships with different people on your team so that you can keep up with their needs, their development, and what they would like to focus on. This can be done in a number of ways:

• Quarterly Reviews – these are a great time to check in and find out what your team members feel confident about, what they need help in, and where they could use additional training.
• Weekly Meetings – If your team is small enough to allow you to meet weekly with each team member, you have a built-in structure to build relationships. Is anything going on in their life that may require additional support? Do they need mentoring in any area? Is there anything you can do to better equip them for excellence?
• Your Leadership Team – you can’t do it all yourself, especially as you grow. By focusing on developing your leadership team, you can equip them to help develop other members of your team.
• Consistent Team Builders – at our monthly Team Builders, we’re intentional about creating opportunities for our team members to share their wins, what they’re working on, and things that they’re looking forward to. This not only helps us grow closer as a team, it also helps me to know how and where to better support them and help them grow!

Building Strong Systems and Workflows

Building relationships is essential when developing your team, but equipping each team member with the systems and workflows to confidently do their job is just as important. When you take the time to build someone up, it’s essential to make sure they’re able to succeed.

Think about it: you can put the time into developing an amazing team, but if they don’t know how you want things done or understand how their work fits into the bigger picture, they’re not going to be successful.

That plays a huge part in their job satisfaction as well as in your team culture as well as in your marketing success, your sales conversions, and your client care.

When your team members feel valued and successful – when they know exactly what they need to do and how they can help the company succeed – they’ll not only enjoy their job more, they’ll also work more productively and profitably.

In short, they’ll get a lot more done in less time and do it with excellence.

This is what strong systems and workflows allow you to accomplish.

Systems help each member of your team understand what they’re doing and why, and workflows help them to see how their work plays into the bigger picture. These do take intentional effort to build out, but the end result is worth it!

Fortunately, this isn’t a process you need to do by yourself. We have created resources to help you fast track the process and our Coaching Team is here to help you put it all together. If you would like to learn more, contact us – we’re happy to help you create the action plan that’s right for you!