Am I creating the right environment for my business to perform?

How often do you ask yourself that question?

It’s a good question to ask and a difficult one to answer. You may be clear on where you want your business to go and you may well have a plan of how to get there, but to be successful, ultimately, it’s all about implementation.

Implementation is all about your team, you need their support to achieve your goals, but they need you to create the right environment for them to perform.

So how can you go about achieving this? Here are my top tips:

1. Plan your diary to give yourself time to spend with your team. In my experience, business owners and leaders do not do this often enough; they focus on what they need to do, they focus on communicating this to the team, but they do not spend time considering how the message has been received and to what degree it is really understood.
2. Ask them what they think. The best leaders look to get the team working together. Their aim is to enable them to build on each others’ ideas. They ask for input and suggestions and reflect to the team these thoughts and ideas.
3. Focus on your listening skills. During your time with the team, ask more questions, let them speak and develop their own thoughts. Help them to clarify their understanding of the objective or goal; ask them if they have any ideas that will help to achieve the objective or goal and ask them open questions as to how they may go about implementing their ideas or suggestions.
4. Set realistic deadlines and review activities regularly with your team. Be systematic in your follow up activity. If you have identified an objective with the team, follow it up, ask them for progress reports and re-confirm that the objective is still important to the business.
5. Give feedback. People value feedback because it shows you have an interest in what they’re doing. It is important to be balanced in your feedback. Be positive, explain what you like, give them some ideas where you think they can improve, but most of all leave them with a clear feeling that their contribution is valued.

This list is not exhaustive, however, if you can begin to consciously follow these tips you can start creating the right environment for your team to perform. Helping businesses to evolve and grow is a passion of mine and what we do at BHP Consulting. To explore these ideas further, get in touch with Mark Roberts on: 07973 349 175 or at mark.roberts@bhp.co.uk.