doug smith training

Are you helping your team grow? Not in size, although that can be useful. Growth in terms of ability, skill, motivation, traction, change, endurance, happiness...are you building those components in your team? If you are the right leader for your team you'll help them grow.  Otherwise, they'll find someone who does. -- doug smith  

  Teams are tricky. Just when you think you've got your team figured out, configured properly, fully set and ready to go, it changes on you.  Every time someone enters or leaves your team, you've got a different team. That's what makes recruiting, hiring, orienting, training, and development so important. If you don't develop your team the way you'd like them to develop, they'll change in ways that you might not care for. Team dynamics require us to build a team as a group, and also as a one-team-member-at-a-time proposition.  It's a project just juggling all of the pieces. It's a big responsibility and as a team leader there is no ducking that responsibility. I've tried -- you can't do it. Teams need their team leader's attention every single day. One on one conversations. Highly productive meetings. Occasional fun (and frequent sense of humor). Coaching to motivate when someone gets stuck. Prodding to get productive when someone gets lazy.

How well do you know your team? Leaders spend a lot of time with their team members, but sometimes don't get to know them very well. If you asked them what their dreams were or what they thought about at night before they went to sleep, would it surprise you? High performance leaders expand their capacity of knowing their team. They learn what they don't know and explore at deeper levels what makes their team members excited, what makes them worried, and what makes them feel valued. When a leader can let the team members know that they are valued, their value increases. I don't know anyone as well as I think I do. I'm going to work at getting to know them better. How about you? -- doug smith

Interested? Register at http://skillpath.com