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Effective Team Building - Finding Your Hidden Gold

Guest post by: Martin Haworth

Article Overview: Managing teams in your organization is a challenging experience. Finding the right people for the roles you have can be a tricky proposition, yet when you take the time to get to know your people, you might be surprised what you find...

Effective Team Building - Finding Your Hidden Gold

We all want the best people in our team. The demands placed on us to deliver results from our role as managers are unremitting as must our search for the best people. Surprisingly, there are individuals around who might offer more than you think. Employees that you already have in place can often carry talents that are hidden away, for a variety of reasons, so there are tactics a manager can adopt to ensure that all potential is realized.

Here are a few to get you started...

1. Keep your ears and eyes open - and engage in conversations that are curious about people. Whatever happens, even if there are few gold nuggets out there, the worst thing is that people see you are interested in them. There's a zillion managers out there who aren't at all interested in their people much at all, so you will immediately get brownie points at the very least!

2. Know that there's talent out there - that you can bring out. People have all sorts of skills, experiences and histories that might be of value, if only you knew about it. You can't find that out unless you get amongst them and find out!

3. Your people will hide their aspirations - because they think you aren't that interested in them. Sad but true, work experience isn't the best place for people to see the generous nature of managers. Far from it. In fact their experience will tell them that a manager may well not even care to know their name.

4. You can make it happen for them - when you know about it. When you do find out about what they are looking for, it's a real big help to you, for them and you and your business. Your role can be enabling for them, by kick-starting new careers that their capabilities could support.

5. Management is often about joining the dots - that you've discovered. See where this is going? As a manager, your prime role is to lead and facilitate the people in your team, not to do everything yourself. When you are that link, with what you find out, then there's a whole new bunch of opportunities out there. Listening to your people, letting them spill their hidden talents as well as their hopes for the future, can be a true win-win.

6. Management is about people - not doing stuff, however attractive that might be. No-one minds a manager giving a hand now and then, it's a choice, not to be depended on. But the role is about people, managing them is the headline, yet it's so much more. Great managers are there to make the best business decisions and these can easily be the best people decisions too.

In fact, when there is a coming together of business needs matched with individual's possibilities, there can be no better way forward.

Your people are chock-full of potential. Releasing it will help you, help them, to make your team much more successful.

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Article Tags: developing employees, developing others, employee development, management development, team building



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Re: Need help in Team Building Activity.. - Team Building Activities are my favorite part. Last time our team was out for an expedition. We got a map and had to find the cave were we also slept and on our way there were other activities. It was an extreme team building and it was organized by a specialized company.
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