The Amazing Benefits Gained By Improving Your Worst Team Member
Every team has a worst team member. The real question is what impact does your worst team member have on your team?
Do they create a slight drag on team performance which is hardly noticeable? Or do they actively create a lot of damage to team performance, which has you, your team members and your boss tearing your hair out in frustration, anger and fear. Chances are you worst team member is somewhere between these extremes.
Your worst team member will be impacting you, your team members and team performance.
The challenges impacting you right now
Some of the challenges you might be experiencing right now include:
- Your worst team member takes extra time to manage and keep motivated and productive which you aren’t able to spend increasing team performance
- You have to correct more mistakes or do more rework as well as spending more time reviewing their work
- Every other team member is working harder to reach team targets and getting annoyed, frustrated and angry about it
- Your worst team member might not learn and improve or does so at a slower pace than rest of team
- Your team’s motivation, standards and collective behaviours are dragged downwards by worst team member
- The worst team member advertises, every day, the standards and expectations that you will accept to the team. Over time they will experience psychological pressure to reduce their standards towards the worst team member’s standards.
- The team loses trust in you that you will resolve the problems and make their work lives better
- Your boss loses confidence in you to resolve the problems and get team performance increasing again
- Your peers get ahead of you – in terms of team performance, influence, impact and promotion.
- Worst team member holds back your reputation, your influence, your impact and your promotion prospects (or outright threatens all of these AND your job security)
You may be experiences some of these challenges or all of them. You may be experiencing minor challenges which would be nice to resolve all the way through to MAJOR challenges you are desperate to sort out immediately.
A Tried And Tested System To Remove People Problems
When you want to or need to improve team performance (the purpose of a manager), improving your worst team member is a must do outcome to achieve.
You have a choice.
You can go it alone and try to get improvement through trial and error. This is a tough route, requiring a lot of resilience, time and effort. You may not get a great result after putting in a lot of effort.
Or
You could borrow a system that works, that delivers predicable results time and time again. This will save you a huge amount of time, effort and stress. You will get great results quickly. Someone else has put in all the hard work of figuring out what works and what doesn’t. I borrowed my “best boss ever’s” system. It made a massive difference to the results I got within weeks.
Being able to quickly and effectively resolve people problems in any team has also been big part of my career success, going from a trainee with EY to board director roles in large companies.
Our system is fair, reasonable, gives the worst team member a good chance, while holding them accountable to improve.
Implement our system well and you will always get significant team performance improvement – certainly a lot more than one person’s contribution.
The benefits you will get
Here are the benefits I’ve got, and many others have got, using our system:
- Resolve any people problem quickly from minor to very major with a fair, reasonable and very effective system
- Gives you confidence to act early, when the problems are a lot smaller, with definite and effective steps that create improvement
- Teaches you how to use a system that helps you and your team member overcome the 6 main barriers to getting improvement.
- Win the respect and trust of your team – to resolve the problems in a very fair and reasonable way, without letting your worst team member off the hook for improvement
- Gain the confidence, trust and respect of your boss because you quickly resolved the issues and got team performance increasing again
- Demonstrates that you can resolve people problems in your team, rarely needing to remove individuals, while increasing team performance and thus makes you a no brainer to give more staff to, for you to manage.
- If you need to remove the individual, the system you follow reduces the risks of doing this and makes the process quicker and easier
- You always get team performance improvement – a much bigger increase than the contribution of any one person
- You can use this system to improve your worst team member, again and again, to continually increase team performance over the long term.
Just imagine how happy your boss is going to be when you deliver all the above? Think about the rewards you will get over time. More influence. A great impact. More team members to manage. More credibility and authority. A higher profile. A more positive reputation. An earlier promotion. A bigger bank balance.
Think what all this will do for your career and your lifestyle.
Why Our System Is So Effective
Our system uses peer pressure, social rules, group dynamics, fairness, reciprocity, and working to remove barriers to improvement WHILE keeping the individual accountable for improving.
Our system does not involve tricky or “techniques”. You can explain exactly what you are doing and why and get as good or better results than if you didn’t say anything.
The actions you take are fair and reasonable. You are being helpful AND looking after the interests of the team and business.
Each stage you go through and each step you take, increases the pressure on the individual to improve and provides the help needed to overcome barriers faced. You are just setting out the playing field very carefully. The choice to improve or leave is made by individual.
In practice, up to 85% of individual chose improvement. This means they perform and behave at the average standards of the team OR better.
You achieve this without damaging the trust and motivation of team. In my experience, trust and motivation of the rest of the team INCREASES because they know if they mess up, they have a clear chance to improve before anything else happens.
You keep the confidence of your boss. They see the trust and motivation of the team increase AND see the performance of the team increase. This is a massive advert for your expertise as a manager.
I Invite You To Join Our Course
Our “How to Manage Difficult Employees” course teaches you exactly how to use our system and use it well. Put in the time and effort to do each step well and you will get great outcomes – from your worst team member and the whole team.
I invite you to click on the button below and join our course so you learn the expertise needed to improve any worst team member and keep team performance improving.
