As an entrepreneur or business owner, you must adhere to the best business management and operational practices so that you make judicious use of all available physical, financial, human, and informational resources to create products and/or services which satisfy needs and wants of your targeted customers.
To ensure that the above idea turns into a reality, you need to create a proper conversion house or manufacturing/operating facility (like a factory or some other kind of workstation) where the actual conversion of inputs into marketable outputs will take place.
You must also make sure that you are creating value from your operations and delivering the created value to all your stakeholders – most importantly to customers, employees, and shareholders.
The above plan will be of no use unless you succeed in mobilising excellent manpower and galvanize them into an effective team. You should also build world class business processes and systems. Building a compelling vision for your organization, and setting goals and objectives matching to your vision will set forth the strategic intent of your organization.
To get the best performance from your team in terms of enhanced production, productivity, and profits, I suggest that you implement the following suggestions:
Follow Good Management Practices:
While as a leader/manager you must practice all managerial functions like planning, organising, leading, motivating, communicating, coordinating, and controlling – you must all the time focus upon the crucial relationship between planning and control.
Planning and control are known as Siamese twins of management (I suggest that you read about this concept from the internet). There is a very close link between planning and controlling. A modern enterprise continuously cycles back and forth between planning and controlling. To start with, the manager makes plans and then uses the control system to monitor progress towards the fulfilment of these plans.
The above practice ensures that you always remain on track and avoid any kind of sub-optimal performance in your operations.
If you are implementing a project, the best practices you develop help you avoiding serious cost escalations and timeline slippages.
Build values in your team:
Apart from identifying and positioning best people in the organizational team – you must ensure that you develop important personal and professional values in your teammates – like honesty, integrity, compassion, cooperation, and collaboration.
Your team members must learn to work in multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural environments and should embrace diversity.
They should be active listeners – and not selective listeners.
Practice assertion and affection together:
Do exercise your managerial authority.
Assert, emphasize, and push your team hard towards challenging goals and targets – but ensuring that you extend adequate consideration and genuine love for each member of your team.
Talk to your team members frequently, understand their personal and professional problems and try to solve these to the extent you can, genuinely address to their apprehensions, anxieties, and fears. While you may talk about their achievements before everybody; talk to them about their mistakes and suggest to them corrective measures only in a private meeting with them (a coffee often does wonders during such a meeting).
Go for Participative Goal Setting:
As far as possible, involve your team members in the process of setting goals for them. I strongly believe that participative goal setting enhances employee engagement. Once members of the team feel that they were involved in the process of decision-making and setting targets — they work on the project wholeheartedly as if they were working on their own venture. Involving employee in goal-setting process also boosts thier motivation up.
Participative goal-setting not only helps team-members to commit to the task completion but also builds their confidence.
Develop a Learning Orientation:
Encourage your team members to continuously follow the path of learning and growth. Ensure that they are provided with necessary support infrastructure to further this objective. Establishing well equipped libraries and reading rooms, arranging masterclasses and expert talks, and presence of in-house counsellors, and mentors can be of great help in furthering this objective.
We should encourage our team members to read good books and biographies to learn from others’ experience.
They may also be encouraged to ask questions and/or interview those persons whose journey had impressed them.
Discipline and Consistency are very important:
Discipline is consistency of action. It is the discipline that keeps us growing – that is the law of consistency. Together, consistency and discipline are the two keys to success in any area of life. You may achieve some goals without them, but when you are chasing bigger goals, you cannot get far without discipline and consistency. Discipline and consistency go hand in hand.
Every member of the team must be consistent and disciplined so that he/she is able to align their contribution to the eventual goals of the enterprise.
Stick On – Do not Quit:
We all have heard the famous proverb – winners never quit, and quitters never win. Train your people to keep struggling, keep trying relentlessly, to never surrender, and to never give up. Businesses will always have ups and downs — therefore, it is important that we maintain an all-time high morale in all our team members so that they are always ready to face any situation or temporary hurdles.
Remember that miracles happen only to those who never give up.