When individual members effectively contribute to the group’s efforts, your team is more likely to achieve its goals. To help employees reach their potential, you must master critical performance management skills. This series helps you understand each person’s motivations, ensure your expectations are clearly understood, provide ample feedback, and reinforce helpful behaviors.
How to Identify What Motivates Your Employees
Your job as leader is to do what you can to get the most out of your employees. To do so, you need to figure out what motivates them. Unfortunately, motivational factors aren’t universal. What motivates one, sucks the life out of another. In this session you’ll learn how to identify the key motivators for each person on your team.
How to Communicate Your Expectations
You want employees to meet your expectations. It’s as simple as that. And when they don’t, you are disappointed at best and angry at worst. Is it their fault? Maybe. It could also be yours. Perhaps you haven’t clearly communicated your expectations. It’s also possible that your expectations are not reasonable. By the end of this session you will identify a core expectation that few employees, if any, currently grasp. You’ll learn how to make sure that they do.
How to Skillfully Deliver Feedback
Employees need to know how they are doing. They depend on your feedback to meet that need. The majority of the feedback you provide should reinforce desired behaviors. A smaller, but equally important portion should focus on changing behaviors. Most managers don’t provide enough of either. And when they do offer it, their lack of skill creates new problems. Come prepared with real-life situations you can use to practice this essential skill.
How to Increase Employee Skills and Confidence
When you think of employees as “important assets,” you want them to do what all valuable assets do—grow. Over time they should increase their mastery of foundational skills. They should also add new skills. Ideally you want them to feel confident in their abilities so that they can rise to meet any challenge and overcome it. Learn what you can do to help your employees add more value through their efforts.
How to Deliver a Helpful Performance Appraisal
Performance appraisals are one tool in an employer’s overall performance management system. Interestingly, few think they are valuable, even the HR people charged with administering the system. Still, most companies use them, and they aren’t likely to go away anytime soon. Reviews have potential, if managers use them in the right way, and if employees fully engage in the process. Learn specific ways to effectively use this tool to improve employee performance.
How to Reward Effective Behavior
There’s a workplace principle that states, “What you reward is what you get.” It’s a simple concept to grasp, but tricky to implement. There are two challenges you must address. The first is to determine what you should reward. It’s not always obvious. The second is to determine what an appropriate reward might be. It varies from person to person. In this session you’ll explore your reward practices and identify ways to make them more effective.
How to Be an Effective Mentor
As a coach, much of your time is spent guiding people to do what you want them to do. Sometimes they want help reaching their own goals. When that happens, it’s time to put on your mentor hat and help them discover answers to the questions they have. Learn how to mentor so that you, your mentee, and the organization maximize the value for the time spent on this activity.