Your main goal as a leader is to guarantee that your team members have the necessary tools to do their job properly. A good leader works at the team’s service, not the other way around. Try to always look for obstacles that are holding your team back and do your best to remove them.
“My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to make them better”, Steve Jobs
In a hierarchical structure, the staff is mostly worried about satisfying their superior, but who is looking after the customers? Who is trying to satisfy the people who keep the organization alive? In the end, customers are the most important people for a business. They are the ones the company should serve, whose needs should actually be fulfilled.
With this customer-centric approach, managers have a clear objective: serve their team and make sure employees have everything they need to care for customers. Their role is not to oversee or control, but to serve. Throughout the entire inverted pyramid, every leader is at the team’s service.
The focus of the leader’s attention
- Make people confident so they reach their optimal performance.
- Design and improve processes.
- Provide tools.
Core skills to make your team better
To be effective, productive, and able to work on a team, its members need to develop certain personal skills, such as:
- Interpersonal communication.
- Assertiveness.
- Negotiation and conflict resolution. (We recommend our video game that helps you practice to reach win-win agreements).
- Time management and personal productivity (Check out our serious game focused to reach work-life balance).
- Sales techniques.
- Problem-solving.
- Customer service (Find out more about how to work with a simulator to become a better salesperson).
- Teamwork.
- Meeting management.
- Creativity.
- Empathy.
Train your team to develop soft skills
You can’t take for granted that everyone has these skills. Usually, they aren’t taught in elementary school, high school, or college, and work experience is no guarantee that they’ve been taken in. Most of these skills are easy to develop: it’s a matter of understanding a series of very basic techniques and practices. The problem is that the vast majority of people don’t know about these techniques.
In addition to interpersonal skills, each role requires certain technical skills that you also have to address. Your function as a leader is to detect those needs and make sure they are fulfilled.
It’s not an HR’s responsibility, it’s your responsibility to make sure your people have the skills they need to do their jobs properly. Don’t hesitate to proactively request training for your team.
If you succeed in getting the people who work with you grow and improve as professionals, you’ll not only increase their motivation but also the team’s synergy and performance. You’ll also achieve levels of loyalty and commitment that are hard to achieve in any other way. People who feel they are better thanks to you will give you back respect, esteem, and loyalty.