How to Improve Work Performance Instantly

A leader must know how to improve work performance instantly no matter what obstacles get in the way. One of the biggest challenges a leader faces in their role has to do with making sure that they have enough qualified people to get the work done. It seems like every time they get a good employee, they either get promoted or they leave the organization to go explore a different opportunity. Over time, this can get very discouraging and start to affect the overall productivity and performance of the entire organization in more ways than one. The morale and motivation of people can drop and they can start to feel overworked. I have personally seen this happen time and time again and have finally figured out a way to solve this problem.

It really comes down to being proactive and when a leader can start to become proactive, they really know how to improve work performance instantly. I developed a concept called "Build the Team Before You Need the Team" which consist of three key components. They are to always be developing your people, empower your people to make decisions, and make it okay for your people to make mistakes so they can grow. By implementing this strategy a leader will never have to worry about whether or not they have enough people to fill any roles that become available no matter which ones they may be. Not only will the leader have little trouble filling positions, they will have improved work performance at the same time. Now let's jump right in and learn how to improve work performance instantly.

The first thing that I recommend a leader do to start building the team before he/she needs the team is by getting in the habit of always developing their people. This is how to improve work performance while obtaining several benefits at the same time. This creates a win-win situation for both parties because the more the people know, the stronger their skill set will become and they will be more prepared to take on both current and future responsibilities. The leader wins as well because the more he/she develops their people, the easier their job will become and they also will have people who are prepared to fill future job openings as they come up quickly. This is important because anything can happen at any given time.

Someone can give sick, get a serious injury, walk off the job, had an unexpected major life change that requires them to move to another state, and the list goes on and on. A leader wants to put the organization in the position to maximize profitability and the best way to do this is by staying staff of the best people. I remember when I used to run supermarkets as store manager. I built a reputation of always being fully staffed with an abundance of great people. If a job opening came up, I just about always had someone in-house that could step right in immediately and do a good job. I'll only reason why I was always able to do this was because I made it a priority to make sure that we will always developing people to backfill every position in the store.

I acted as if there were never going to be candidates that were qualified outside of my building and because of this mindset we hardly ever had a staffing issue. The other cool thing about this is that most of the time our people were developed so strongly that even if we did have candidates outside of our store; our people were better qualified for the position. I can't really think of another store manager in that company that took people develop their as serious as I did and it paid off. This stuff work's and this is how I know how to improve work performance.

The second thing the leader should do is empower his/her people to make decisions. This has a lot to do with what was just shared but empowerment in itself builds leadership skills. In my opinion, empowerment is one of the most powerful ways of developing people but at the same time one of the most under utilized concepts as well. People are so used to being told what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. There's nothing wrong with this but if you really want to know how to improve work performance at its highest level, a leader has to teach their people how to fill a leadership role.

Every once in a while instead of the leader telling their people what to do, the leaders should ask them what they think needs to be done next. The leader should also let it be known that if something happens and a decision needs to be made right away and the leader just so happens to not be around that its okay for someone else to make a decision. One of my mentors told me that making the wrong decision is always better than making no decision. That is so true and I still think and act on that statement every day of my life as well as teach it to others. I want you to share your comments about this on my blog as well as any questions you may have about this. Go there now why they're fresh in your mind!

The third thing that I highly recommend that leaders do is to make it okay for his/her people to make mistakes or even fail. They must be very careful with this tip because traditionally we are taught that making mistakes are bad. Think about it, every time students make a mistake on the tests they took back in school they lost points and if they make too many mistakes they end up failing the test. The truth is mistakes are good because they help people learn. The more mistakes people make the faster they will learn. Another one of my mentors by the name of Alex Mandossian said that "There is no such thing as failure, there is only winning and learning". What a great mindset to have!

Let's refer back to what we were just talking about earlier regarding empowerment. When a leader empowers someone to make decisions, there will be times where they make the wrong decision but the leader must support it. If they don't that person may not feel comfortable making a decision ever again in the future. So what the leader has to do after supporting the decision is to share with that person what they would have done differently if it wasn't the correct one. If it was the right decision, congratulate them and celebrate the win. Now in the future, they'll know how to handle that same situation if it ever comes up again. By doing this over and over again they will begin to develop the decision-making muscle of each person they empower.

In conclusion, knowing how to improve work performance instantly is simple when you know this strategy and is not used even close to as much as it should. "Build the Team Before You Need the Team" gets a leader into a proactive mindset of continuous professional development of the people within his/hers organization. People are a leader's number one asset and the more they focus on their development, the stronger their people will become and the stronger the entire organization will become. People want to learn and grow but they need a leader who is going to take the time to help them and when this happens they win, the leader wins, the customer wins, and the organization wins. Visit my blog today to post any questions you may have as well as any feedback on this information. Looking forward to hearing from you soon!

Rob Moore helps people in leadership positions get their people to perform better no matter what they do. Give him the people who are challenged with a lack of motivation, low productivity, under performance, poor attitudes, and he will turn them into top performers.

Show Up, Step Out, & Shine!

http://www.leadershipperformancetips.com/

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Here's a Quick and Easy Way to Improve Performance at Work

In order to improve performance at work, a leader has to improve the overall level of communication within their organization to keep the people informed of what is going on. A level where the people working under he/she understands what the vision of the leader and/or organization is as well as why certain things are done on daily basis. Also, making sure that people clearly know where they stand in performance on a daily basis and then providing a safe environment that keeps things moving in a positive direction while limiting the negatives.

In short, I call it Creating a Culture of Transparency. When you can create this type of culture, you create a win/win situation for everybody. Some of the benefits are that people will know and understand both the long term and short term goals of the organization, why they're aiming for these goals, and where they fit into the big picture. Now let's go into more detail on how a leader can implement these strategies into their work day.

The first thing a leader needs to do in this area to improve performance at work is to Share the Vision. This can be their vision or the organization's vision but I highly recommend that they lead with theirs so they can provide the greatest impact on their people. Whether they're working for an organization or not, their people will be following them more than they are following the organization so this is critical. The people need to know the big goal that everyone will be working towards. Sharing the vision with them does many things such as providing motivation, making them feel like they're apart of something bigger than just a job, and so much more. When I look back at all of the jobs I had before I got into the corporate atmosphere, I never knew what the vision of each company was.

To me they were just jobs and I was only there for a paycheck but once I got into the corporate arena it was a totally different story. I became so emotional entrenched into the vision for that company that it was extremely difficult for me to leave them and move on to serving a higher purpose in my own personal company. I loved working for that company because of who they were and what they were about. I loved being a part of what they do and this is what a leader has to create with their people to build a strong connection. When implemented properly, this strategy alone will dramatically reduce turnover and improve performance at work which means less training expenses, less hiring, better performance, and increased productivity. I'm pretty sure I left some things out but I think you got the gist of it. Feel free to submit any questions and/or comments through the contact page on my blog.

The second thing that a leader should do consistently, continuously, and as much as possible is to Tell People "WHY". This is a great way for them to build trust with their people but is not the main reason why they should consider doing this. They should do it because people will be more willing to do something if they understand why they're doing it rather than doing something without knowing the purpose. They obviously don't have time to give an explanation for every task at every given time that has to get completed but the more the merrier. Every single one makes a difference! Think about it, let's say that someone was told to take a break at four o'clock rather than five o'clock and they really wanted to take it at five.

They might get upset at the fact that they can't take a break when they wanted to that day. Now we can possibly have an unhappy employee here. Let's apply what was just taught by adding the reason for the break time change. This person needs to go on break at four o'clock because it's a lot slower at that time than it will be at five. It will most likely be extremely busy then. The supervisor might say something like this, "We need all hands on deck and if we take the chance of giving you a break at that time you could possibly not get one and we don't even want that to be a possibility because you deserve your breaks." As you can see this makes a huge difference in the way a person views the supervisor's instructions. If you're enjoying the tips and strategies that have been shared so far make sure you visit my blog today and leave comments!

Thirdly, one of the most overlooked tips that will drastically improve performance at work is to continuously Let People Know Where They Stand so they know the direction they need to go in next. The one or two evaluations people get at their job is not the time to sit down and start addressing issues. It's a time to sit down and reward people financially for their performance over the past year. They should have a pretty good idea of what their evaluation will look like going in and not be surprised by anything on there. If they are, shame on the upper management team. The reason why I say this is because they should be constantly giving both positive and negative feedback to their people on a daily basis.

Leaders have a responsibility to develop future leaders and improve people's performance at work. People should know their strengths, weaknesses, and have some things that they're working on to take their performance to the next level. I've been in management for over 17 years and during the last half of it, I was responsible for managing other managers. Whenever one of them had a performance issue within their department, I would always ask two questions. The first one is "Did you have a discussion with the associate about the problem?" and most of the time it is a "no". Second one gets asked to the associate who supposedly has the performance issue which is "Did so and so ever talk to you about blah blah blah?" and the answer is always "no".

This is ludicrous because nothing can get solved until both parties realize that there's a problem! This reminds me of an associate that was applying for a promotion in the store that I was managing at the time. I asked him what his supervisors would say he needs to work on to get to the next level and he didn't know. I even called them all to find out the good and the bad and got nothing concrete or specific. All I got was he does a great job from one person and I wouldn't take him for that position from another person. How can this associate grow or even fix his issues if he doesn't even know what they are. Unbelievable! In my personal opinion, this is why we have so many performance challenges in the work place but the buck stops here! Nobody wakes up in the morning and says to themselves that they can't wait to get to work so they can do a bad job.

Lastly, let it be known that you will Provide a Safe Environment where people can safely speak up to express their opinions, questions, concerns, solutions, ideas, issues, etc without being penalized, reprimanded or made fun of. From my experience, most people don't like to speak up because they don't think that what they have to say has any value or won't be listened to so why bother. Leaders can only fix the problems that they know about so if they don't at least start to create this kind of environment, no one will open up. I believe that everyone has something to say that's valuable. There is no such thing as a stupid question except for the one that wasn't asked. This strategy takes more time to develop than the other three but is just as powerful.

A safe environment is a positive environment and everybody loves a positive environment. Eventually, more and more people will begin to open up on all types of levels and synergy will be created. I was infamous for always saying that "I'm always busy but I always have time". I made it really clear that any associate can come to me at any given time to talk to me about anything that they wanted to. Then I would listen and do everything in my power to either solve the problem or come to some kind of understanding. There was always something good that came out of every one of those meetings every time. Some people would call this the act of having an "open door" policy which is more crucial than most leaders think.

In conclusion, creating a Culture of Transparency can be very powerful because it creates an environment where people will always be honest and upfront with others in the workplace. There will be more people in the environment choosing to never tell a lie or try to jerk someone else's chain. The more a leader can be honest to the point of telling their people what they need to hear rather than what they want to hear no matter how much it hurts, the stronger their relationships will become.

By doing this, credibility and trust will be built with their people and they will eventually begin to do the same. People will always work harder and better for someone that they trust and respect than they would for someone that they don't. Think about it, would you really go the extra mile for a supervisor that you didn't like? Building trust is how the best leaders improve performance at work in a very simple fashion. For more great tips like this make sure you visit my blog right now!

Rob Moore helps people in leadership positions get their people to perform better no matter what they do. Give him the people who are challenged with a lack of motivation, low productivity, under performance, poor attitudes, and he will turn them into top performers.

Show Up, Step Out, & Shine!

http://www.leadershipperformancetips.com/

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