As a leader and the owner of a business, you must know how and when to make your employees perform better. It is actually a reward-and-punishment principle at its core, but you can’t devise a strategy based on that raw understanding. Follow the ideas below for inspiration:
Get Personal with Your Employees
This strategy may sound risky because, as the common code dictates, “You must separate your personal life from your professional life.” But that is not the case if you are a leader.
You should be able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your employees so that you can assign them with tasks that are within their capacity. This may sound like an abstract concept, but you can actually get to know your crews by giving them a personal gift.
Break Down Your Big Goals to Become More Feasible
The most frequent mistake that a leader makes is to set unrealistic goals. For example, let’s imagine you as a CEO of an app development startup. When you want to create a mobile app, there are at least ten factors that you must be concerned with: deadline estimation, target audience, feature relevance, user flow, user reviews, user interface, multi-platform compatibility, testing stage, team communication, and app marketing. With all of those in mind, it will be too unfeasible if there is no clear task division between workers. Break down your app characteristics and features to feasible scales to keep your crew’s morale high.
Be Open to Your Team
As a leader, you must avoid making decisions without your core team members knowing about it. You must also get accustomed to communicating the progress of the current projects to employees who are working on them. Not only will it be perceived as a token of appreciation but also a motivation to them.
Identify the High Performers and Reward Them Accordingly
This strategy may be considered irrelevant by business experts these days. They prefer to emphasize that there is no ‘I’ in a team. This may work in some forms of business, but if your field is highly-competitive, that mindset will slow down your company. What you can do instead is to develop keen eyes for high performers and make them an example to others. Also, you should always give them appropriate awards.
Be Flexible
Don’t mistake this leadership trait with over permissiveness. You should not tolerate negligence, betrayal, and lies. Once you let them free, your company will be destroyed from the inside.
What it means by being flexible here is to give opportunities to employees who make a mistake but are willing to learn to fix it. Being flexible in this sense also means that you must avoid getting trapped in business traditions that can hamper your progress. If your workers have a better idea, go with them.