There are many different facets of running a business successfully and growing it. Just maintaining an older business is entirely different from a start-up without the proper procedures or systems in place. Similarly, handling business difficulties is separate to people management, coaching, and mentoring too.
To help get your head around this complexity, this article is focused on growing your company through its people and how that links into many other areas of the business.
To Get Where You Wish to Go, a Destination Must Be Chosen
For companies, the destination is their goal or mission. This isn’t really the Mission Statement which is an overly optimistic take on the morals of the business and what it stands for (although this is important too) – it’s about what it’s aiming to achieve. The Mission Statement is about how it intends to behave in the course of pursing these goals.
To know where the business is going, the leader must decide what it’s going after. Often a new leader arrives and sets some fresh strategic objectives for the company. This is intended to galvanism a worn-out workforce who probably didn’t see the last few ‘initiatives’ followed up on, and are a bit jaded by the whole thing. Nevertheless, a leader must inspire with a new set of goals and set a plan for how to achieve it too.
It Starts at the Top and Trickles Down
The leader must decide on what the company is pursuing and then create a plan for the senior management team to follow. That can be done in consultation with them, or they can state the plan and let each manager decide how best to approach it.
Sometimes, individual department heads are best at deciding how to pull their team together to get the results required based on how they currently operate. Indeed, they’re often best at determining if the current personnel or processes are insufficient to get the desired results and make changes where appropriate.
People Management Skills Bridge the Gap in Motivation
For jaded team members who have seen several major changes in directions before over the course of a few years and are dismayed by the whole thing, they must be pulled aside to encourage them to ‘buy into’ the process.
When a department head is clear about why the new objectives make sense, and forthright about how the members of his or her team can executive towards their achievement, this can inspire disillusioned team members to get back in the fight. At that point, there’s something at stake, they want to feel a part of the goal’s achievement, and have a plan to follow about how to get there.
The department leader and team leaders provide the clarity of vision to prevent second-guessing and false starts. Their emphasis that there’s no time to waste – proceeding with haste – galvanizes their team to pull together as one.
Mentoring and Coaching Team Members is Key
Keeping employees in the fold who were previously unhappy with the company is seen as a bad thing sometimes, but the situation can be turned around. Rather than wasting time trying to find their replacement and paying redundancy pay too, it’s often best to put extra time into getting them up to speed again (or for the first time).
For department heads or team leaders, taking the ILM level 5 qualifications in coaching and mentoring course is a great step forward to assist other team members to move past mental or emotional obstacles. If you’re in this kind of position yourself and want to be of more help to other people in the team, then get yourself enrolled on the program today.
The ILM Level 5 Coaching Courses are there to provide the training, mindset and critical thinking improvements that are integral in developing a top performing team. Without such courses, it’s very difficult to know what to do for a team member who’s struggling. If you’re in that situation, acknowledge what you don’t know and seek to learn how to be a better mentor of your people.
A Big Picture Focus
Seeing the big picture goals for a company is useful, otherwise it will aimlessly create products or services without knowing what the core vision is. Or, alternatively the company drifts along doing what it’s always done until it suffers through the innovation of other businesses that are more active.
Instead, by focusing on company goals and objectives that can be broken down into their actionable parts for team members to pull towards, and managers to act as mentors to grow the abilities of staff members, the whole company becomes stronger as a result.
By not leaving anyone behind in the pursuit of growth, a greater market share, and increased profits, companies can expand more reliably and withstand bumps in the road far better too.
