Finding high-quality talent is crucial for the success of any organization. Today, organizations employ every sort of tactic to ensure they hire the best person to do any job.
However, it is also essential for any organization to create an environment where they can recognize the true potential of an employee. Your employees are important for your business. As a leader, you need to ensure they grow and reach their full potential.
When your employees reach their fullest potential, the overall productivity of your business improves. As they understand their strengths, weaknesses, and limitations, working with them to overcome these limitations can make them more productive.
But the question here is as a leader, what can you do to help your employees reach their full potential?
7 Tips to Ensure That Your Employees are Reaching Their Full Potential
As a leader, it is part of your job to motivate your employees and facilitate a healthy work environment.
This can be challenging as every employee is different, and what may motivate one employee may not motivate another. To increase overall productivity, it is important that your employees are working towards their full potential.
Here are seven tips to facilitate the growth of your employees and help them realize their goals:
1) Encourage Ongoing Training and Personal Development
Learning is a lifelong journey, especially important for career development. A leader who creates an active learning environment and development can help employees identify and fill gaps within the workplace. Employees who are encouraged to identify their strengths and weaknesses and challenge themselves are bound to improve their quality of work.
By investing in ongoing gender bias training and personal development, you are improving employee motivation, satisfaction, and are keeping up with trends and changes in the industry. This will help your business stay competitive, and reduce employee turnover rates.
But what if your employees are unsure about their goals, or weaknesses?
A personal self-development plan template is highly beneficial here. Employees play the main role in their development, with their managers guiding them. These personal development plans encourage individuals to seek out their aims both short and long term. When an individual feels in control of their skills, and are willing to acknowledge their shortcomings, they are likely to challenge themselves. You want your employees to feel like they grow with you, learn with you, and are valuable to your team.
2) Recommend Networking Opportunities
We all are aware of networking outside of our workplace, and the benefits it carries. What is less talked about, but equally important is internal networking.
Like external networking, internal networking is the strategic but casual interaction between colleagues and departments within a workplace. This can look like the office mixers at your workplace, online chat groups, or even attending events with your colleague.
Planning ‘lunch dates’ with colleagues is a simple but effective way to network with your coworkers. You might say that you spend enough time at work, and the last thing you want to add to your schedule is mingling with your coworkers. Although this is a common feeling, internal networking has multiple benefits for individuals and the organization as a whole.
Some of these include:
- Improvement in communication between coworkers
- Increase in engagement within the workplace
- Generation of great ideas
- Collaboration between departments
- Sharing information about the industry
All of these have been found to improve overall productivity and motivation among employees. This could be a good opportunity for your employees to mingle, connect with colleagues, and learn more about themselves in the process.
3) Challenge your Employees to Take Risks
Creating a healthy risk-taking environment in the workplace has long-term benefits for a workplace.
A leader who encourages new ideas, projects, or methods to solve internal issues should focus on recruiting people ready to take risks, to begin with. For example, during the hiring process, looking for out-of-box answers to questions, or creative suggestions should be encouraged.
By making risk-taking a core value of the workplace, leaders should reward employees to step out of their comfort zone or successfully take a risk. Reinforcing their healthy risk-taking behavior is important as employees tend to fear making mistakes, looking foolish, or failing.
Focus on hiring employees for a long duration to reduce turnover rates. Employees who have been at an organization longer are more likely to take risks. This might seem surprising because people tend to get too comfortable over time. Right?
Well, research shows that for poker players, those with more experience are more likely to take healthy risks. Why shouldn’t this be translated into the workplace?
So if you’re a leader, make sure to encourage discussions of new ideas, reward them, and initiate them if your employees are hesitant! This way, they will feel rewarded and appreciated when trying to reach their full potential!
4) Be Transparent About Their Role in the Bigger Picture
It is important that you are transparent with your employees about projects, why it is important for the business, and what the employees are doing that contribute to its success.
Just stating orders and tasks to get the project done may not be enough to engage your employees. Explain the goals of the project, your vision for the business, and include your employees as a part of it.
Remind them of their contribution and encourage them to share their visions for the project or business as well. Don’t just share statistics or facts about the project.
This can motivate your employees and also encourage them to reflect on their current skills, and how they can improve or learn skills while working with you. It’s important that recruiters and leaders understand how to effectively guide employees to use their skills for the relevant project.
All of this together can successfully contribute to an execution strategy! So do not hesitate to be open with your employees.
5) Get Social with Team Building Activities
While internal networking is one way of facilitating communication within a workplace, team-building activities allow employees to view each other as individuals with personalities and perspectives.
Getting to know one and another outside the professional realm can foster creativity and innovation for new ideas and help each other feel less isolated.
Social relationships are a significant predictor of good mental health, so why shouldn’t this be encouraged within the workplace?
Although your main outcome might be to help your employees reach their full potential, an added benefit could be the formation of friendships.
Especially today when most of our work is virtual, it is important to enjoy leisure activities virtually with other people. Singapore is the number one country investing in virtual team building activities, as feelings of isolation can decrease productivity by 21%.
Activities like escape rooms, movie nights, or a cooking class are great ways to wind down and socialize. Virtually, a cooking night or movie night is still a great option!
So as a team leader, make sure you invest in such activities and have some fun!
6) Maintain an Open Environment
‘My door is always open.’ We’ve all heard this from our supervisor or boss at some point, right?
Did we truly feel like we could approach them for any sort of issue? Probably not.
As a leader, if you say something along those lines to your employees, mean it. If you’re not sure if your message has come across to them, don’t worry, you can work on it. Show that you are open to constructive criticism, both positive and negative, and not just ideas and suggestions. Your employees probably might have many thoughts or feedback on your project and vision but haven’t openly expressed it. You can learn a lot from your employees too. To make this happen, you need to be perceived as approachable and trustworthy.
Organizational psychology is the scientific study of human behavior in the workplace and in organizations. Some qualities of an effective leader are:
- Motivates others
- Sets the example
- Good communicator
By being a ‘good’ communicator, you need to show you can truly listen to what your employee is saying, and keep up a good rapport. Your employees also need to be able to trust you. By practicing these behaviors, you cultivate an open environment where your employees can freely discuss their challenges. Similarly, offering benefits like a novated lease ute can help build trust by showing that the company values its employees’ personal and professional needs.
You want to guide them, build a strong network, and allow your employees to reach their full potential.
7) Acknowledge and Recognize Their Efforts
Although your employees are adults, they too require the occasional recognition and appreciation. Don’t just focus on the results, but also praise their efforts and work ethic regardless of the results. This can be done one-on-one or among other coworkers. Employee recognition software can help streamline this process by ensuring that appreciation is constant and visible throughout the organization, pushing staff to strive for excellence continuously. Let your employees shine and feel proud of their work!
Performance appraisals are a great way of delivering constructive feedback in a positive way and identifying areas that need more work. They improve morale and also help in identifying employees eligible for promotions.
You want your employees to feel seen, appreciated, and heard.
Conclusion
This might seem like a lot of work, but it is something that happens gradually, not overnight. So start incorporating these tips into your workplace.
If you encourage your employees to be open with you, and you are open to learning constantly, it is very likely that your employees will be on their way to their full potential.
Comment down below the tip you perceived as the most helpful!
Author Bio
Atreyee Chowdhury works full-time as a Learning Experience Designer and is passionate about writing. She has helped many small and medium-scale businesses achieve their content marketing goals with her carefully crafted content that is both informative and engaging. She lives in Bangalore, India with her husband. She loves to read, experiment with different cuisines, travel, and explore the latest content marketing and L&D trends in her free time. You can reach her on Linkedin or write to her at atreyee.c@gmail.com
