6 Benefits You Get from Developing Your Team
Developing your team takes time and effort on your part. If you are at all unclear on what developing your team gives you personally as a manager, please give me a few minutes of your time. Don’t miss out on a huge range of benefits – for you personally, your team and your business. This video will help you explain to your manager how investing in developing your team will create great results.
Be the manager that has been promoted way ahead of your current peers, not the manager kicking yourself in years to come wondering why you got left behind. There are of course many factors in getting promotion – improving results and team motivation help massively.
Developing your team is a key enabler of many benefits you get back when you invest in training and development for your team
After managing team for over 25 years I know the investment you make in developing your team members will be paid back many times over.
6 Benefits You Get From Developing Your Team
- Improves team dynamics
- Builds team leadership, problems solving and decision making skills
- Increases team motivation and staff retention
- Helps attract higher performing employees
- Increases the volume and quality of output
- Help you the manager get promoted
Written by Jess Coles – 10 Minute Read
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improved team dynamics – the first benefit you get from developing your team
Personally putting in the time and effort to
- understand what your team members want to achieve in their career,
- then organising and involving them in tasks, activities and projects which will help them develop towards their career goals
is a pretty massive demonstration that you care about them and that you are trying to help them achieve their career goals. Developing your team members also demonstrates you are going to help each employee do well at their job.
You get a lot of goodwill from team members, which you can use to ask more from your team – a fair exchange if you like. Both employees and manager are helping each other achieve their personal goals – a great foundation to create a positive atmosphere and good team dynamics.
Better Leadership Skills – The second benefit
Leadership skills including improved problems solving and decision making skills within team members.
Developing each of these skills in your team members helps you personally. Rather than just you being a leader or having to solve the problems the team faces or make all the decisions, you have at least some of the team members helping in each area. This takes some of the burden of leading and managing a team off your shoulders. Personally have more time and less stress as a result.
You are helping create the managers and leaders of tomorrow. You have a group of individuals that are increasingly capable of doing parts of your job. This gives you space to learn and develop yourself by taking on new projects and challenges. You move your career forward and help team members do exactly the same. A great foundation for succession planning.
Increased team motivation and staff retention – The third benefit you get from developing your team
If your staff have put themselves through university or have worked to get a professional qualification, chances are high that they want to continue developing themselves and moving their career forward. Working for a manager who is keen to keep them learning, to keep them developing is very motivational. You are helping them achieve their goals – who wouldn’t appreciate that!
If staff are learning and they can see their career progressing, they are less likely look outside of the company for career progression. The longer you can help them make progress against their career goals, the longer you will retain your staff. Combine this approach with effectively managing any difficult or underperforming employees and you will keep the better staff for longer, which in turn increases team performance. Good for everyone.
attracting higher performing employees – The fourth benefit
Finding good people to recruit into your team is tough in any business climate. Current staff shortages in many professions make getting good people even harder.
One compelling way to increase the attractiveness of joining your team is to be able to demonstrate a clear track record of developing team members. When you meet with potential hires or those potentially transferring into your team, talk them through:
- The steps you take to understand personal career goals and then work to help individuals progress against these goals
- What training programmes – internal and external – that your team members are able to take advantage of
- The case studies of internal promotions and career progression of current and former team members
Use the investment in training & development as a way to attract higher performing employees. From personal experience, showcasing development track records for team members works very well.
Increased volume and quality of output – The fifth benefit you get from developing your team
Think about it – when we are unsure of how to do something it takes longer. If we are not confident in making decisions it takes longer. If we don’t have good enough skills, the quality of what we produce is likely to lower rather than higher.
What you get from developing your team is a higher level of skills – both technical skills as well as softer skills such as decision making and problem solving. With better skills, the tasks, activities, projects, and problems the team members are working on will be completed quicker and better.
This means that the team overall will:
- Be able to produce more as they will be able to do each task etc quicker and better
- Your Team’s quality of the output will improve
- The range of problems the team can solve will increase, making your team more valuable to the company
The more value the team can add to the company, the more valuable your ability to improve team performance. This in turn will mean you are much more likely to be give additional team members to manage.
Good news for all involved!
you are more likely to get promoted – The sixth benefit you get from developing your team
All the previous 5 reasons we have gone through help:
- Increase the motivation of the team, which leads to more and better work and value creation
- Increases the volume and quality of the team output. The more value a team can produce for the company, the more valuable the team is and the manager who has created the improvements
- Reduce the cost of recruitment and training as you will keep your team for longer, and they will be happier to stay
In my experience, all these reasons produce a huge return on investment from developing your team. The company is a lot better off. Therefore, providing those managers above you understand and link the work you have done to the results your team produce, you will very likely be given more staff to manage and be promoted. If you struggle with how you or your work is perceived, we have a free booklet sharing how to improve this area.
What investing in training your team does for you far outweighs the time and effort you invest. That has certainly been my experience over 25 years of managing teams
Developing your team is a win-win all round
As promised here are 7 different development routes you should consider.
Firstly 4 Key development options in your control which don’t need a budget
- Use weekly one-on-one meetings with direct reports to coach, mentor, and train team members. You will have a lot of skills that you can help pass on and you don’t need a budget to develop team members.
- Create on the Job Learning opportunities. Mix up the tasks, activities, projects, and problems assigned to team members and provide support to cross train and help them learn new skills.
- Set up Peer to Peer Learning or Buddy systems. Get team members to share their experience and skills with each other.
- Ask team members to provide mini training sessions to the rest of the team to share their skills and experience
3 Additional common development routes which will need varying levels of budget
- Formal external training courses such as the Management Skills Accelerator programme that enhance.training provides. Also see what internal courses are available within your business.
- Mentoring programmes – using internal or external managers. These can be great to pass on knowledge and expertise – perfect to bring in new skills into the business without hiring those skills in
- Coaching programmes – which can be delivered by internal or external coaches. Do choose coaches that have been formally trained and have good coaching experience. Coaching is a specific set of skills.
On a separate note – leaders can benefit by developing coaching skills which provides a valuable additional leadership style to add to an existing repertoire, helping leaders become more effective across a greater range of situations.
In summary
In summary, what investing in training your team does for you far outweighs the time and effort you invest. That has certainly been my experience over 25 years of managing teams so I would 110% recommend you invest the time to develop your team.
The results of your investment won’t be seen overnight – but you should start to see signs within weeks and certainly being enjoying the benefits of developing your team within months.
Personally, in this very competitive workplace, I don’t think ambitious managers can afford not to invest time and effort in developing their team. If you don’t, other managers will, which means they are more likely to get ahead of you.
Making the time to mentor and coach team members in my view is an essential investment to improve team performance. Not only do you increase skills (which directly improves team performance), you also increase motivation, ownership and create a much better exchange for your team members to work hard and do a great job.
Invest in developing team members and you will get a lot more back. I have experienced this amazing “return on investment” over 20 years of managing others, in multiple teams, in may different companies.
Develop your team!
Jess
