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Succeeding As a Leader – Focusing on Building a Strong Team Around You

StrategyDriven Management and Leadership Article |Building a strong team|Succeeding As a Leader – Focusing on Building a Strong Team Around YouWhen you are leading others, you naturally have a lot of pressure and strain to deal with. Improving how you lead, working towards being successful, and making a difference can be difficult things to achieve – especially if your team or colleagues are working against you (and not with you). To ensure that this does not happen, you have to focus on building a strong team around you. You cannot succeed in leadership all by yourself. The support and cooperation you will get from your team will be defined in your role both now and moving forwards. So, what proactive action do you need to start taking?

What Do You Want to Achieve as a Leader?

To begin with, you need to think about what you really want to achieve as a leader. For example, are you looking to raise profits within a business? Are you looking to improve productivity and efficiency? Are you looking to bring everyone together, and form a united business or company in the process? What do you want to achieve and why? When you have this vision firmly in your sights, you can then begin to push forwards. This question is relevant to consider both in terms of your work and your personal goals, so it is one to consider carefully.

Why You Need a Team and Support Network

Now that you have your vision and ideas for the future, you may be questioning why you need a support network and a great team around you. The answer is of course simple: you need them because you need their support and you need their input. As a leader, you can only achieve so much on your own, or by yourself. You need guidance, you need support, and you need backup, and this is what you can expect to get from a great supportive team. You will naturally think that what you are doing is the right way, you need constructive feedback from other people to establish whether you are right or wrong – what works and what doesn’t.

Connecting With Your Team – Finding Common Ground

Leading from the front or leading from the middle means that you need to be connected with your team. To find common ground and truly connect with your team, you have to do things that build relationships and also build trust. For example, you could organize a get-together with key team players at a UK stately home. The best stately homes to visit in the UK have spaces for groups to get together, and they have room for you and your team to connect and strengthen bonds.

Decisive Leadership

As a leader, you have to be decisive, and you have to be assertive. If you are not decisive, then how will others follow what you say, and how will you have a lasting and sustainable impact. To ensure that you are being decisive in as many areas as possible, you need to analyze your behavior and your response time. Are you making decisions as soon as you can? Are you taking decisive action in all work that you undertake? Struggling to be decisive can make you seem weak to colleagues and team members, and this can affect the level of trust that they hold in you.

Tips For Improving The Way Your Team Works

StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Team Building|Tips For Improving The Way Your Team WorksDo you find that your team could be working much more effectively? There are many ways that you can improve the way that your team works, and these will depend on the kind of team that you are running and whether you are in the position to make some changes or not.
Here, we are going to give you some of our top tips for improving the way in which your team works. Keep reading to hear what these might be.

Introduce New Software

Is your team wasting time on things that could be done by a new piece of software? It can be easy to get bogged down by mundane tasks that need to be done but this can have a negative impact on the way that your team works. To combat this, you should try to invest in new software that your team can use to automate tasks and focus on the work at hand.

Improve The Working Space

If your team is being forced to work in a cluttered working space that is not good for aiding their creativity, then you might need to make some changes. To do this, you should spend a few days decluttering the workspace and call a junk removal service to come and pick everything up. Once you have done this, you can go about rearranging furniture and improving the working space that you have for your team.

Allow For Better Communication

Does your team know how to communicate effectively with each other and yourself? Communication is key in business and you need to make sure that there are appropriate channels that they can use to talk to each and solve problems quickly. Try to implement an open door policy and encourage team conversations to get your team working to the best of their ability.

Give Feedback

Our final tip for those who want to improve the way in which their team works is to try to give feedback. You should consider hosting weekly meetings with your team members to discuss their work and what they could improve on. This meeting should be a two-way conversation that allows them to discuss any issues. They should then take the feedback on board and improve their working style as time goes on.

Final Verdict

It is entirely possible to improve the way in which your team works if you know what to start with. Consider changing the work environment that they spend their days in and try to encourage communication in the office.
If you can follow the advice that we have given you in this article, then you should be able to get your team on track to getting results. It is important that your team knows how to work effectively together in order to have your business be a success. Follow our advice and you won’t regret it when you see a massive change.

Taking On Your First Team Members: Everything That You Need To Know

StrategyDriven Talent Management Article |Team Members|Taking On Your First Team Members: Everything That You Need To KnowYou’ve done what seemed impossible – you’ve managed to grow your business to a point where you need to take on additional team members – and you couldn’t be more excited. Your business has started to grow and you know that if you get your approach right, you can ensure that your business has the very best chance of continuing to grow and thrive.

The only issue is that you’re feeling a little overwhelmed by the process of taking on your first team members; it’s a lot to take in, after all. The good news is that just because the concept of taking on your first team members seems like a somewhat daunting one, that doesn’t have to be the case – there are plenty of steps that you can take to make taking on your first team members a less stressful and more enjoyable experience.

Wondering what those steps are? Below is a guide to everything that you need to know about taking on your first team members!

Bolster your knowledge

Before you can even think about hiring your first team members, it’s important that you take the time to boost your knowledge and understanding of how the hiring process works, as well as what it takes to be a good employer. You might find that by choosing to undertake a couple of management courses that you might find learning to be a boss – because it is something that’s learned – becomes easier to manage. If you’re serious about being the best employer that you can be, then it’s definitely something that it’s worth taking the time to master.

Don’t go it alone

Not sure how to cope with taking on your first team members and all of the admin that goes with it? Don’t panic – take the time to think about hiring a specialist to help and support you with the hiring process. You will find that if you have some HR support on hand, either full-time or on an adhoc or freelance basis, you can make the process of hiring team members a far more enjoyable and less stressful one.

Take safety seriously

One of the most important things when it comes to taking on team members is to understand the importance of adequate health and safety at work. When you run a business, you can be held accountable should a team member hurt themselves while they are at work, which is why getting health and safety right is so important. You might find that guides like Carlos Ramirez Safety guide could be useful to help make understanding the ins and outs of workplace safety a little easier.

There you have it, a simple guide to the ins and outs of taking on your first team members. There’s a lot to think about but the process doesn’t have to be as stressful as you might think.

3 Strategies To Help You Listen to Your Employees

StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Listen to your Employees|3 Strategies To Help You Listen to Your EmployeesYou must learn to get the balance right as a leader. When you are so determined to protect your business, this could be to the detriment of the people that matter, your employees. Many employees talk about wanting their voices to be heard, the fact is that they want someone to listen to them. Employees demand feedback, but they want support too. And this means that leaders have to be more aware of individual needs. What does it take to learn how to listen to your employees?

Be Mindful

Advisors like Paul Ognibene provide a treasure trove of information on being a great leader. But a great leader is not just someone who knows how to be in charge, they are someone who is very aware of their surroundings. This means that if you are not able to acknowledge the situation based on body language and other forms of non-verbal communication, you have to work hard on developing this intuition. Learning to be engaged in a conversation is not just about listening, it’s about understanding what you need to do to be present. We’ve all had conversations with people who are not actually in the room, despite being physically in front of you. And as a leader, everybody is keeping their eye on every move you make. If you ever appear disconnected, this will be to your detriment.

Learning to Engage

Learning to listen is not just about listening to what they have to say, but it’s about asking them to elaborate and encourage them to expand upon what they mean. If you start to engage yourself in a more active way like this, you will start to follow up with your employees. This gives them a signal that they know you are listening and paying attention, and it gives you the opportunity to check in with reality. It’s a habit that is so important, but asking questions could be a very simple way for you to remind yourself to engage. But it’s about making sure that you ask questions that encourage employees to elaborate.

Never Judge

You may think that you are someone who keeps your mouth shut until it’s time for you to speak. One of the grave mistakes leaders make is that they think that everything they say is important. The best leaders are those who make their followers feel that everyone is the same, including the boss. And if you judge others, not only are you making harsh criticisms about something different, exposing yourself as immature, but you are not listening. And if you are unable to embrace new approaches and merely judge what other people say, you will never adapt to change.

Remember, it’s about developing the skill. You may feel that external stresses are getting to, which hinders your ability to listen. But this is where you have to learn to take a step back. Running a business is not easy, and any external pressure can knock you off-kilter in an emotional sense. But if your employees feel that you’re not listening to them, this is a one-way ticket to low morale.

HR Management Can Help Develop Your Team

StrategyDriven Talent Management Article |HR Management|HR Management Can Help Develop Your TeamHuman resource management requires a wide range of qualities such as: leadership, proper time management, ability to motivate employees and assertiveness. In this section you will find a variety of tools that will help you upgrade your recruitment system, human resource management, management team development, tips and skills.

The perception of the role of the manager today is completely different from what existed 30 years ago. The variety of capabilities and multi-tasking that the manager is required to perform, leaves them very little free time to actually manage their employees. In the form of management today, is the manager first and foremost a leader? New employee recruitment processes and new job training processes are due to the Achilles heel of many organizations and small businesses. How to train employees? The answers in the article in front of you. It all begins with good training. Work training is vital to ensure that everyone is working to their potential.

The issue of productivity and the work of interfaces often arises in work in medium and large organizations. We lose valuable work time and build ineffective processes. Through proper work and a method of building processes it is possible to significantly upgrade the efficiency in any organization and save time and money.

Assimilation of procedures and processes in a focused management

Processes, efficiency, proper time management and tasks are among the four most common things most organizations today talk about. Often, we talk a lot about these issues, but do not carry out a deep and rooted process for deepening method and language in the organization.

An excellent recruitment strategy requires the use of your entire team as well as some aspects that you may not always anticipate. To help build the process, we have some tips to help you attract the best talent. After all, who does not want a large amount of inquiries on their site, constant phone calls from customers, new project management, new tasks and other profit channels for the business.

Many articles have been written about the status of management as a profession. Academic discussions, workshops and professional philosophical discourse on the subject have existed for decades. Despite this, as of today (and probably for years to come), there is no compulsory course or professional training in order to become a manager or improve management skills. So are you a manager looking to employ new staff? Like an electrician, an accountant, an engineer and a lawyer, a manager is also a profession and like any other profession, in order to perform it optimally it is important to learn and also to experience the work they are in; which is how training can maximize their skill. However, employing the worker is the first step.

Getting a new team together

Sometimes the simplest strategies are the best: recruit the most amazing people you know, make sure to keep them regularly happy, encourage them to bring in their most talented friends, make sure to provide great experience to each candidate and repeat this process regularly until your employees become recruiters. When you get to a point where you can not repeat this process, you have probably started developing a dedicated in-house recruitment team. If their experience with your organization is particularly positive, even non-accepted candidates still serve as recommenders for your organization. Poor candidate experience will usually leave a sour taste, not only for the candidate who came for the interview, but also for the employee who made the referral. It does not matter how much the organization pays, or how big projects the organization has, if you fail to treat candidates with the same appreciation you would provide to a veteran employee, you are doing a poor service to the organization. I’ve added a quick list of topics to make sure your candidate’s experience is on track. It is advisable to make a neat list for the recruitment process. Let’s not forget that you want to attract the very best people to your company. You can’t do this if you appear incompetent, incapable and inefficient.

How to interview potential employees: Freestyle interviewers versus template interviewers

We have all encountered one or two freestyle interviewers in our lives. Those who do not work with a page or a set of ready-made questions. They are usually big refusers of the pattern and their ability to feel and feel the candidate will determine whether they will be accepted or not. The questions do not repeat themselves and sometimes it is also not clear what they are asking.

How is an interview from intuition and gut feeling a rational and process interview? Very simple, because what those people call a gut feeling or intuition is an analytical process. How is this possible? The same gut feeling or intuition works in such a way that when we see a certain behaviour. We go back in time and identify patterns of identical behaviour, connect the same patterns in people and situations we have encountered in the past and draw a completely statistical conclusion which predicts the future behaviour of the candidate. If those interviewers who rely on feeling actually perform a thought and analysis process then where is the problem? Why are they not interviewing well enough? For several reasons and the main one is that they conclude how someone will behave in complex situations at work based on their behaviour in an unnatural situation which is a job interview. I will expand on the problems with the ability to draw conclusions in this way later.

In stark contrast to freestyle interviewers, the template people leave nothing to chance. The questions are ready in advance. Each answer indicates a character trait or behaviour of the candidate and there is almost nothing left that is prone to interpretation. Everything is clear and it is possible to know everything about the candidate before getting him a job, the people in the template say (and are wrong). Those who come to the interview with all the questions prepared in advance often find the best outcomes, for the business and its future.