December 19, 2022

Emotional Competence: The second key pillar for Manager Effectiveness

Emotional competence in the context of managers is the ability to be self-aware of their own emotions and have a social awareness of the emotions of their employees. They should also use that information to manage employee interactions and create a productive and positive work environment. It is an essential skill for managers because it allows them to effectively deal with their employees’ emotions. Emotional competence is also a critical factor in decision-making. To be an effective manager, you must have a good understanding of how emotions work. You need to be able to read the emotions of your employees and respond accordingly to maintain a healthy workplace environment. Additionally, you must empathize with your employees and understand their feelings to establish trust. Finally, you need the ability to set limits without resorting to too much emotional blackmail or coercion. Essentially, there are 9 reasons why emotional competence is critical for managers. Read more. There are four significant constituents of emotional competence for managers.

Overall emotional management
Handling team tensions
Empathy
Managing conflicts

Some of them might look similar but have nuances that make them different. Let’s dissect each one of them.

To begin with, one must have a basic understanding of the basics of emotional management. Following that, one must understand the difference between feelings and emotions. To become influential leaders, managers must be able to understand and regulate their own emotions, and they must also be able to help their team members do the same. It is imperative when making rational decisions can be difficult in times of stress. Managing emotions in the workplace can be difficult. It can be tough to stay positive and motivated when things go wrong. However, managers must maintain a positive attitude even when the situation is challenging. Otherwise, negativity can quickly spread throughout the team, causing a hostile atmosphere that affects people’s productivity at work. Emotional management from managers’ perspectives is a two-way process. The first is about managers managing their own emotions, and the second is about managing their employees’ feelings. Both of them are significantly important for any manager. To build a deeper understanding of this topic, read this detailed guide on emotional management. This guide provides answers to the fundamental questions behind this complex topic.

When emotions are not managed, team tensions flare-up. These tensions come up as widespread problems that managers face worldwide and can be the root cause of workplace conflicts. Therefore, managers should treat these as the early signs of conflict and should work to handle them effectively. Tensions can arise due to several factors. As a manager, it is crucial to understand these possible causes and prevent them from happening. If not handled, situations can spiral into more significant problems affecting the team’s productivity and stability. Read here to learn more about the possible causes and cures of team tensions. There would be situations where you will find yourself in the middle of a conflict. Either as a direct party or an indirect party. Conflict is a disagreement or hostility among individuals or groups about something. It can be physical, verbal, emotional, social, and even workplace. Anything from a dispute about a project at work to a disagreement about resource allocation can spark a conflict. Conflict can be healthy or harmful, constructive or destructive, depending on how you handle it. In general, we see conflict as unfavorable because it can lead to division, anger, and even violence. A conflict can also become extremely dangerous if left unchecked. There can be various causes of conflict in the workplace, including different goals, personalities, opinions, beliefs, standards, work styles, etc. There are six basic strategies that can help you manage conflicts better.

Finally, it is Empathy. It is a different topic altogether but extremely important for managers to have a well-rounded capability when it comes to Emotional Competence. Empathy allows us better understand the other person’s situation and help them cope with problems that seem to be beyond their control. On the other hand, a lack of Empathy in an organization can negatively affect the effectiveness of its employees and will reduce the chances of a productive work environment. Managers who lack Empathy might also have difficulty maintaining personal relationships with co-workers, superiors, or subordinates as they don’t internalize appropriate emotions for the situations in which another person is involved. In the end, it is not only the manager who needs to build Empathy. They actually need to inculcate Empathy in the entire team. And there are five essential things managers can do to start building Empathy in their teams. Emotional competence is essential for managers. It helps them in their professional life, and it also makes the working environment better. To be a manager, you must have a high level of emotional intelligence. You need to be able to handle your own emotions and know how to work with other people’s emotions. The four building blocks for emotional competence can get you started in your journey to handling this complex topic with ease.

One-on-One Meetings: The Most Essential Tool In Any Manager’s Arsenal

One of the most critical aspects of effective people management is regular and frequent one-on-one meetings. These meetings are essential for thee reasons:

First, one-on-one meetings provide an opportunity for managers to get to know their team members on a personal level, which can build trust and encourage collaboration.
Second, one-on-one meetings allow managers to give feedback and clear instructions in a confidential environment. This enables team members to be more open and receptive to feedback, which helps them improve their performance.
Third, one-on-one meetings allow managers and their team members to discuss complex issues better avoided in more extensive group settings.

One of the managers’ most common mistakes is not scheduling enough one-on-one meetings. Managers who do not regularly schedule one-on-one meetings are likely to experience lower productivity and morale among their team members.

To have fruitful one-on-one meetings, managers should be well prepared. This preparation can include making notes and using a recording device if appropriate and with permission; taking inventory of the project and gathering information on similar projects is also helpful. There are a variety of ways to structure one-on-one meetings. Some managers prefer to hold all their one-on-one meetings in person, while others may use video conferencing software or a virtual meeting tool in the hybrid era. Whichever approach you choose, it is vital to ensure that each meeting is focused and specific in its purpose. We have six core tips for you to master this essential skill. Read on here.

Most managers I speak with often ask me, “Ashish, what should I ask in the one-on-one meetings.” It is common for managers who are not used to these meetings to be confused about how to conduct them. Remember, these meetings are mainly for the team member and lesser for you to give feedback to them. I usually follow the 80-20 principle. 80% of the time is focused on the team member, and 20% of the time is focused on me providing feedback to them. Depending on your working relationship, the frequency of the meetings, and how deep you are in the process, there are a bunch of topics on which you can fix the agenda. The questions you can prepare to ask will depend on the topic you want to address. Here is a handy guide that lists 25 questions on different topics you can ask. Obviously, these are not exhaustive. You can always customize these and add more specific ones for your situation. But these will surely get you started and sustain you until a solid habit is formed. As I said, most of the time is reserved for the team members to talk. So you must encourage them and ask as many open-ended questions as possible. For this to work effectively, you must have developed active listening skills. But don’t worry, you will get your chance as well. When you speak, you must focus on only a few things.

Giving constructive feedback
Aligning the team member with the team’s direction and objectives
Relaying critical information that concerns them
Addressing conflicts

As you do this, you will see that you are using some common words across all your one-on-one meetings. This is what we call the manager’s vocabulary. There are a few words that every manager must understand and use for effective people management. These words cover a whole range of areas across the people management spectrum. I will not build the suspense further but rather share these words directly with you. This article lists these words and also their importance and usage. So, here you go 🙂 In essence, managers can get so much done through these effective one-on-one meetings with their team members. Not only do these meetings help to keep track of the work done by each team member, but they also provide a platform for resolving conflicts and ensuring that everyone is on the same page. It is, in fact, the lifeline of a manager and team member relationship. However, with so many distractions in our lives, making time for these critical interactions can be challenging. So remember, they are essential, and you must make time for the important stuff in your work life.

Preparing to manage a new team?

The Top newsletter for aspiring professionals

You might be an experienced manager or a new manager, you will find yourself in situations where you are managing new teams. A fresh start is always exciting. At the same time, managing a new team can be a daunting task. It can be tough to know where to start as a new manager. What are the best practices? How do I deal with different personalities? You’re trying to put together a cohesive unit that can work together to achieve common goals, and you have to do it while balancing the needs of each individual.

Fresh starts, new challenges.

You must first understand that you are forming new relationships with your team members in this new role. They were habitual working with someone else. You are taking over, and they will be apprehensive of you first. As a manager, it is your job to make them feel comfortable. No doubt that you are trying to find space for yourself.

Avoid typical managerial myths.

In such situations, managers often take the route of “establishing their authority.” While this may work in some cases, in most situations, this may backfire. Why? Without understanding your team’s psychological needs, you are bound to push where you shouldn’t push. Hence, as a new manager, it’s essential to be aware of the pitfalls during your first few months. By being aware of these common pitfalls, you can avoid them and foster a positive environment for your team. Just like this, there are other myths that you must avoid as a new manager.

Build a rapport with your new team.

Right at the start, if there is only one thing you must focus on is building a rapport with your new team. It is a relationship of mutual trust and understanding built for the long term. It’s how you create a connection with another person, and it’s the first step in developing a relationship. Taking the time to build a rapport with your subordinate team improves their productivity in the long run. When employees feel like they can trust their manager and open up about their concerns, they are more likely to be productive and cooperative. Building a rapport with your new team might be a bit time taking but is highly important for having a healthy relationship with your team in the long run. You can read more about building a lasting rapport with your team.

Actively listen to build lasting trust.

Finally, it would be best to focus on actively listening to your team members in the initial days. As opposed to passive listening, active listening is an intentional act meant to demonstrate that we have heard what the other person has said. It is done by focusing on their words and asking questions to get deeper into the essence of their message. It is an essential skill for any manager to have. But in your initial days with a new team, it will help you build lasting trust and loyalty. Building active listening is a step-by-step process, which you can read here. With the right approach and planning, it can be a successful experience. So whether you are just starting or in the middle of a transition, we hope that these articles will help you get started on the right foot.

Does your team feel they are overworked?

Pandemic has changed the way we work. Most importantly, the lines between personal and professional hours have blurred. Although there are many benefits of remote working, one unintended consequence has been burnout. Teams often feel overworked and, as a result, burnout. Did this feeling in the workforce not exist before the pandemic? It did. In some environments, employee burnout has been a challenge, even pre-pandemic. In most fast-growing environments, companies are often understaffed. This leads to extra pressure on the workforce. Typically, in these environments, the employee churn is high. High employee turnover further adds to the pressure on the employees that stay with the company.

There are various reasons why employees might feel burnt out, and they almost always stem from work overload. When there’s too much to do and not enough time to do it, people feel overwhelmed and stressed. This, in turn, can lead to several symptoms, including low energy levels, anxiety, and depression. As a manager, you will not be able to deliver on your objectives effectively if your teams constantly feel overworked and burnt out. Here are some symptoms to watch out for: exhaustion, poor concentration, irritability, anxiety, and low morale. If you notice any of these symptoms brewing in your team, it might be time to take a step back and assess the situation. Overworked teams are prone to making mistakes, leading to frustration and chaos. In the end, if your teams are unable to deliver on their objectives, you will not grow. So, what can you do as a manager? The first thing as a manager you must do is take some time to assess the workload your employees are currently facing. Once you understand the challenges they are facing, you can start to create a better work environment that helps employees stay focused and motivated. By properly allocating resources, you can free up time for your team members to do their best work while still meeting deadlines. When you have too many tasks competing for the same resources, it becomes difficult to get anything done. By grouping tasks together based on their importance and urgency, you can better allocate your team’s resources to ensure that all tasks are completed on schedule. This will help you get your team back on track and meet your deadlines! Effective resource allocation is a critical aspect that managers must develop. One must keep in mind several factors while attempting to become good at this. We have listed five simple steps that you can follow to improve resource allocation. In environments where employees feel burnt out or overworked, negative emotions run high. In such an environment, conflicts are commonplace. Few people know how to manage and express their negative emotions constructively. Irate employees often go on a rebellious path. As a result, most of the team’s energy goes into unconstructive areas. Keeping the team motivated and focused on their goals can be challenging.

As a manager, you can help the team constructively manage their emotions. But this all starts with you managing your own emotions effectively first. This will help you keep your team calm and productive, despite their pressure. By understanding the emotional triggers of your team members, you can better deal with challenging situations and keep everyone on track. This can be an opportunity to use the negative emotions and bring people together around it. People connect and empathize with each other when they find themselves in the same adverse situation. If you become a master at emotional management, you can turn this adversity into an opportunity to bring the whole team together and ride the wave. You can not remain in this situation. While you help the team manage emotions and allocate resources more effectively, you must also work with the team to ensure their wellness. Overworked employees will often be not well-rested and nutritionally balanced. To avoid this problem, it is essential to promote employee wellness and provide them with the resources they need to stay healthy and productive.

The organization has a role to play in this, no doubt. But as a manager, you can also do a lot to ensure employee wellness. When you take extra steps for employee wellness, the employees will see that you care. This builds lasting loyalty towards you and helps the team deal with adversity better. What can you do as a manager to promote employee wellness? Managing an overworked team can feel like a never-ending battle. In order to reverse the situation and maintain better productivity, managers must realize that they have much control over the situation. It just needs a little bit of reflection and a few simple steps listed above.

Do you find yourself constantly following up with your teams?

Following up with the team is hard. I get it. It is even harder to do it constantly and get a little response from the team. Teamwork is essential for any business, but it’s even more critical for your success as a manager. As a manager, you are responsible for many tasks, and you are expected to deliver that with the help of your team. If you and your team don’t deliver on time, it impacts the team’s performance and overall career progress for everyone involved. So, where is it going wrong? Is your team not capable enough? Maybe! Or are they not taking enough ownership of their work? Possible. You can’t give up on them just like that. So what can you do? What if your team felt comfortable coming to you and giving you updates? So the first question to ask yourself is, do they feel comfortable coming to you and discussing their challenges, roadblocks, and failures with you? As a manager, it helps to be approachable and personable. If you become more approachable, you won’t have to follow up that often.

Being approachable is key to building good relationships. It can be challenging to be approachable at first, but it becomes easier with a little bit of practice. Here are three ways to be more approachable:

Be aware of your facial expressions and use them to control how people perceive you. For example, a smile can be a powerful tool for building trust and rapport.
Be honest and upfront about your needs – don’t make assumptions. This way, the team can be sure that they’re addressing your concerns and that you’re not just asking for favors.
Speak in a positive tone – it will show that you’re interested in working with the team. By being positive, you’ll put the team at ease and increase the chances of a successful outcome.

If you want to go deeper, we have listed a few steps that you can implement in behavior and process to become more approachable to your team. Another common reason managers find themselves in a constant follow-up situation is not setting clear expectations and deliverables. Setting SMART goals helps encourage team members to reach their potential and achieve the goals you’ve set for them. By defining and focusing on the goals, you create a sense of ownership and encourage them to work hard towards them.

Once they know what they are after, they will chase it. As a manager, you won’t have to check with them daily. Isn’t that liberating for everyone involved? The trick is to do SMART goals properly. Here is a detailed guide on how to do it. Finally, patience is a virtue when you find yourself in this situation. Practice patience, and you will soon find that the rewards are immense. Remember that everything happens at its own pace and that you shouldn’t try to rush things. When following up with the team, be patient and know that they will eventually get back to you. If you want to take things further, make sure that your follow-up is personal. Sending an email rather than just texting or calling will show that you’ve taken the time to get to know them better and can help create a stronger relationship. But don’t be this guy 👇

Chances are that your team is under stress, and it would be a great help if you figured out how you could handle those times when everything seems like an uphill climb. In addition, treat each member of the team individually. By communicating with them directly and personally, you will get a lot closer to knowing what they require from you to do their best work. There are more benefits to practicing patience while leading teams. Here are 6 tips that can help you develop it. Being approachable and having the ability to practice patience are both essential for any team member. By following up less often, you’ll not only be more likely to connect with your team members, but you’ll also avoid any misunderstandings. I would love to hear from you when you implement these tips. If you face challenges, talk to me.

Guidance Ability is one of the key pillars of Manager Effectiveness

Guidance is something that all humans need. We need guidance when we are lost. We need it when we are trying to figure out what our life goals are. Guidance is an important part of life and it helps us get on track and stay on track with our personal and professional lives. Similarly, getting the right guidance is very important for any individual to grow and succeed. In the workplace, this responsibility of guiding an individual falls into the hands of the managers.

In fact, managers must be selfish about guiding their team members better. Why? To answer this let’s step back and look at what a manager is supposed to do. In essence, they manage a piece of work or responsibility that they try to deliver or conduct with the help of their team. To be successful in their objectives, managers need the complete support and capability of their teams. Hence, what they really need is

The team to be performing at its level best
Addressing any problems or roadblocks that come effectively
Trust on the team that they will deliver on what is expected from them
Constantly improving the skill set of the team

Proper guidance from a manager helps in building these points. So, if you want yourself and your team to be successful, you need to guide your team effectively. That is what we call a manager’s Guidance Ability one of the core managerial skills. So how can you go about building your Guidance Ability as a manager? There are 4 core ingredients to building that capability. First and foremost is your capability to be a Role Model. To effectively guide the team into certain behaviors and practices, managers will have to be role models themselves while showcasing the same behaviors and practices. This means showing and demonstrating what your desired employee conducts are at the workplace. A manager who is a role model effectively directs employees on what is expected of them at the workplace. Moreover, they set the right examples of company values. Read this guide on how to become a Role Model for your teams.

The second most important ingredient is your ability to Facilitate Collaboration in the team. It enables the team members to share their ideas, experiences, and knowledge effectively. It simply makes the team more self-reliant. It prevents the manager from becoming the decision-making and execution bottleneck. Building Guidance Ability doesn’t mean that you are the single source of guidance. In fact, as a manager, you must leverage every available resource to you to guide your team members. And who is better than their peers and colleagues? When you unlock this, you don’t remain the bottleneck to guide someone. There are other hands and legs that are also working for you.

Read this guide to Facilitating Collaboration in your teams.

The third ingredient for Guidance Ability is your ability to Nurture individuals. Nurturance helps managers to guide employees by forming relationships with them along with providing support in their development. Nurturing is a process of developing the potential of a person or group by providing support, guidance, and encouragement. It involves providing care, concern, and empathy to help them grow into their best selves. Furthermore, it also helps them in keeping employees motivated in times of challenges at the workplace. As a result, the team knows that there is someone supporting them at each step and that builds trust. Read this guide to develop Nurturance in your repertoire. Finally, the most important ingredient of Guidance is giving Constructive Feedback. Constructive feedback is the key to guiding their employees and helping them grow. Moreover, it helps managers in encouraging improvement and development among their employees as well as identifying areas for growth more effectively. Giving feedback is the opportunity to recognize the good things that the team member is doing. It is also an opportunity to work with them to identify improvement areas. The core principles behind constructive feedback include focusing on genuine care, giving corrective feed-forward, focusing on actions and behavior instead of personality, and being credible.

Read this guide to become a pro at giving Constructive Feedback. Managing people is one of the most important responsibilities any manager has. So, to be successful, you must have a clear understanding of your employees and be able to provide them with guidance and direction to reach the goals you have set for them and help them reach their full potential.

Do you often find yourself doing your team’s work?

Last week, I spoke with a manager, and she said, “Ashish, I often find myself doing my team’s job.” This is how the rest of the conversation went. Ashish: “How does that happen? Tell me more.” Manager: “When they are working on tasks, they are often unable to finish them. They are not confident if they will be able to finish it in time or not. When the deadlines are approaching, I have to jump in to ensure that we meet the deadlines.” Ashish: “Is there a skill gap in your team?” Manager: “No, no, they are skilled. In our team, we have all the skills that we need.” Ashish: “Then what happens?” Manager: “It impacts the tasks I am supposed to do. I am not able to effectively keep my stakeholders informed. In certain cases, clients don’t get the attention they need from me.”

It is not the first time I have had this conversation with any manager. It can be tough to balance your team’s work with your own as a manager. Juggling the two can often lead to inconsistent or poor outcomes, leaving your team behind. There are a few reasons why managers do their team’s work. The first and most important reason is that they care about their team and want them to succeed. This is demonstrated through their willingness to delegate tasks and set goals for the team. They also make sure everyone knows what those goals are and help them reach them. In the end, managers can focus on their job objectives and the team’s success. For the team to be successful, the team must function well. Effective Delegation prevents mistakes and ensures the completion of tasks on time. Moreover, the manager leads and manages the team effectively. However, when the team’s work isn’t productive or doesn’t meet expectations, it can harm the manager. In such a scenario, the manager may feel responsible and be distracted from their primary goals. More often than not, the limitations are in the manager’s delegation skill set. How effectively the manager delegates work to their subordinates drives the overall productivity and efficiency of the team. When done correctly, Delegation can unlock so much hidden productivity and engagement within the team. Moreover, you free up your time to focus on higher-priority tasks. Some of the elements that are critical to effective Delegation are

Overall project timelines
Team member’s individual skillset – strengths and improvement areas
Effective communication of expectations
Support from the manager or other team members
Manager’s ability to provide constructive feedback

For a detailed guide on How to master Delegation, read here. Another major factor that causes managers to do their team’s work is not able to provide Autonomy within the team. Teams that have high levels of autonomy function smoothly. In such teams, members know their respective roles very well. Moreover, they take a lot off the manager’s plate and work with the freedom to deliver what is expected from them. It brings responsibility and accountability to the team members. It needs a very high level of managerial expertise for the managers to pull this off. But once achieved, it can be enriching for the managers and the team alike. While attempting to give Autonomy to the team, you must tread carefully. Not all team members may be ready to take high levels of Autonomy. That’s why you must go through a structured process to understand when and where you can give Autonomy. obviously, you go through a progression curve to keep increasing the levels of Autonomy higher and higher. Here is a more detailed piece to understand the nuances of giving Autonomy to the team.

Finally, you need to watch out for the signs of disengagement in the team. Not being able to deliver the work on time and as per expected quality despite having all resources is one of the signals of disengagement. If you start to see this as a pattern in one or more team members, you must begin scanning for other signals of disengagement. As a manager, this should be a DEFCON 1 state. Early warning signals can help prevent loss of productivity, business, and team members. If you see this happening, you must seek help to address the disengagement situation in the team. What signals should you watch out for? Read here.

In essence, you shouldn’t take the situation lightly. IF you find yourself doing your team’s work regularly, something much change. Neither you nor your team will achieve their full potential in this situation. All of you will remain in limbo for your professional growth.

How to become an indispensable manager for your company?

The feeling of being indispensable to your organization is an exceptional one. It has the power to satisfy every aspect of professional, social, and emotional needs you have as a working professional. It gives you a sense of being valued and respected. It doesn’t come easy. There is a lot of hard work behind it. Not just to get there. But to stay at that level also. But the rewards compensate very well for all the hard work you put in. As a manager, being indispensable means that you and your team are critical to the organization’s success. You have a crucial role to play and contribute value to the team that others could not carry out.

For a manager, there are some tangible and intangible benefits of achieving such a status in their organizations.

More autonomy and responsibility
Witness faster career growth
Work on the most critical problems faced by the company
Get to be a role model for high-performance standards

So, the question is, How do you get to that state? It doesn’t happen magically. You need a structured thought process to get there. People are not born with such a capability. You can actually build it by working on some critical aspects. In total, there are 11 qualities that you will have to achieve. You might already have a bunch of them. You can start working towards the rest of them. You can read about all these qualities here. In addition to these qualities, you must be a result-oriented manager. A result-oriented manager has a natural bias for results. Result-oriented managers are committed to working with their teams to achieve collective outcomes. They are always looking for short and long-term solutions to problems and put in the extra effort to succeed. These managers understand that they cannot make that progress without a shared understanding of goals and an alignment of interests. They are also decisive, take charge when necessary, and can motivate their team to achieve the desired results.

But often, there is a risk that managers may fall into a result-only trap. This is when they focus so much on results that they try to achieve them at any cost. This often leads to a negative impact on the team. The cost of falling into this trap can be enormous in the short and long term. So what is the right way to be a result-oriented manager? Read here. Keeping your team’s psychological safety in mind is one of the most essential points to remember to avoid falling into the result-only trap. Researchers have found that Psychological safety is one of the critical factors of successful team performance. It is the feeling among team members that they can take risks without fear of retribution. You can not become indispensable if you do not have a high-performing team backing you up. Psychological safety is the belief that you are safe to be yourself around other people. It breeds in an environment that is free of psychological threats. In such an environment, team members feel confident that their co-workers will not embarrass, humiliate, or punish them for speaking up or making mistakes. Such an environment fosters creativity, risk-taking, emotional intelligence, empathy, growth mindset, and sound mental health of the team members. What can you do as a manager to create a psychologically safe environment for your team? Read here for answers. Being indispensable to your organization is challenging yet achievable. The riches that wait for you beyond the hill are worth the effort to go through the grueling journey. Moreover, once you learn how to do it, you can easily replicate it in any new environment.

The secret to consistency: Building and sustaining a team

A manager’s role in a company can vary depending on the type of company they work for and the position they hold. However, in general, managers are responsible for the overall success and growth of the company. They own different chunks of the company’s objectives and are supposed to achieve them. Obviously, they can’t do it themselves. They need people working with them to achieve those objectives. AKA a team. Hence, managers are also responsible for ensuring that employees fulfill their roles and meet company goals. A team is vital for a manager because it provides a support system for them. A manager can’t do everything alone, which is why having a team of dedicated people helping them achieve their goals is so valuable. Having a team also allows the manager to delegate tasks and responsibilities to the team members, making the job easier and more efficient. In essence, a manager is as good as their team. To be a good manager, who delivers the company’s objectives consistently, they must have a good team that delivers on their objectives consistently. Finding the right people to join their teams becomes increasingly tricky as businesses grow. It is especially true in today’s competitive market, where skilled professionals are in high demand and are often hard to come by. To bring consistency in their efforts, managers not only have to attract the best talent but also have to retain the talent they have hired and groomed over the years. Constant chopping and changing in the team brings the overall team performance down. Note again, the quality and stability of your team will directly impact your’s and your team’s performance. So how can managers attract and retain the top talent in their teams? Read more.

One of the key factors to attracting and retaining talent is effectively selling your team to a prospective candidate. It could be an external or internal candidate. To hire for your team, you must consider yourself a salesperson. In essence, if you get someone excited about working in your team, the chances of that person accepting your offer and joining your team would be higher when you make an offer to an exciting candidate. Most good talent would have multiple opportunities in the market. You need to tell them how working for you is better than working for anyone else. This process should become an integral part of your interview stage. You can allow the candidates to interact with your team and encourage them to find out answers to the following questions.

What work will they be working on after they join your team?
What is working for your team better than working for any other team?
What can they look forward to learning?
What growth prospects can they expect?
Who would then be working with? Will others in the team add value to them and vice-versa?

In a nutshell, help them subtly discover “What is in it for them?” You can read more about how to effectively sell your team to a prospective candidate here. Eventually, people will leave your team for several reasons. You can’t control it. A healthy turnover is healthy for the team for several reasons. One, it doesn’t stagnate people in their careers. Two, it allows for fresh ideas and perspectives to come into the team. Three, as a manager, you will gain from bringing new energy. There is no fixed quantitative benchmark for what a healthy turnover looks like. It will depend largely on the context of the team. What you can assess is for what reason people are leaving your team. These reasons are healthy if you as a manager can’t control them, e.g., someone wanting to relocate closer to their family, go for higher studies, or change career directions. If people leave for reasons you can control, i.e., the environment in the team, wellbeing, culture, work quality, quality of peers, etc., then you must be worried.

There are situations where you may be able to retain someone after they have expressed their intention to leave the team. If you can understand their concerns and address them effectively, they might be willing to give you a second chance. But whatever the case may be, you need to have a proper checklist to effectively offboard members from your team.
So, what should you do when a team member decides to leave your team? Read more here. To conclude, the managers are responsible for their teams being highly efficient and competitive in the market. To achieve that, you must have highly talented professionals on your team. You can either attract great talent in the market or retain the incredible talent you already have in your teams.