Developing Your Team Members

It’s never a great idea to work in a silo. You have make sure you’re working with a strong team.  Learn how you can strengthen your team and your leadership.

Today’s post is by Mike Figliuolo, Managing Director of thoughtLEADERS.

Personalizing Your Leadership Approach

Do you feel like you’re investing a ton of time in your people and not getting the results you expect? Do you have team members who are performing well, but you just can’t get them to improve? Are some of your team members disengaged and you worry about them leaving your organization? 

I’ve dealt with all of these situations, and I’ve taught countless leaders how to overcome these challenges. As a result, I developed a framework called the Leadership Matrix to help deal with these issues. I’ve also written a book that explains this matrix in depth. 

Here, I’ll cover how to assess how you’re spending your time and energy. How to reward and inspire your high performers. How to get results out of team members who aren’t contributing. How to train and motivate your low performers. And how to reclaim your time from team members who tend to waste it. By using this approach, you can generate better results by being more efficient in how you lead your team members.

Use a return on investment approach

Have you ever had a situation where you apply one leadership approach to one person on your team, and it works, and you apply the same approach to another person, and it doesn’t? Do you feel like you give your team members a fair amount of time, but for some people, it’s never enough, and for others, it’s always too much?

Developing your team members requires you to treat each team member as an individual. You have to understand their personal development needs. You have to invest your time and energy accordingly. Focusing on driving the right behaviors and giving team members the guidance they require will develop them more rapidly and effectively.

Think like an investor. Make different investments for different people to get a better return on the investments you make in terms of their individual results. This approach gives clarity on where and how to invest your time and energy by using tailored leadership tactics for improving individual results.

Leadership as capital

Your time and energy are limited resources. You can squeeze some more out of certain areas and take from other elements of your life, but that’s not a sustainable approach. 

If you squeeze too hard bad things can happen. I’m speaking from experience. I’ve had two heart attacks over the years because I was working too hard. 

Your leadership capital is the amount of time and energy you have to invest in leading, managing, and developing your people. It’s a finite resource. You have to invest it wisely to get the best results out of your team without burning yourself out in the process. Knowing where you spend your time and energy is the first step toward leading more effectively. 

When’s the last time you assessed where you’re spending your time and energy? Are you getting the results you want from those investments and your team? There are four major activities that are going to consume your leadership capital. Those activities are directing the work, doing the work, delivering the work, and developing your people. To assess where you’re investing your leadership capital watch my course on leading effectively.  You can also take the assessment online to get your results immediately.

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

Want to learn more about developing your team? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to assess and improve your strategic plans. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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