08 May In This Job Market, it’s Time to Reimagine Your Teams
As Marcus Buckingham famously said in his co-authored book, First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently: “Bad managers play checkers with their people and good managers play chess.” However, in today’s red hot employment market, employees seem to be winning the game! Is now, therefore, the time to reimagine your teams?
Most hiring managers have several, if not dozens, of positions to fill, and it may be taking much longer to fill them than expected.
These same managers may also have employees who are filling seats but not necessarily performing up to the level that’s needed.
In the meantime, companies have set their annual goals, and the work still needs to get done. So what can you do if you aren’t finding the right candidates and the work is piling up?
At Talent Suite, we consult with employers regularly to help them find ways to reimagine their teams. With a few tweaks to how you’ve “always done things,” you can emerge stronger and better positioned than you were before the job market heated up.
Here are three techniques to give your teams a tune-up or even a full reset, to be sure your business goals are met.
1 Marry the Right Work to the Right People
A behavioral analytic tool like Predictive Index can help you understand the people you currently have on your teams, particularly their strengths, weaknesses, and ways they achieve success at work. By learning about your team members, you may identify people who are being under-utilized – or you may realize that certain projects are a better fit for team members who have historically worked on other things.
A bonus of being willing to shift people around (a.k.a. reimagine your teams) is that you may improve employee morale and energy, by shifting people to work on projects that are well suited to their strengths.
2 Seek to Understand Gaps on Your Teams
If you have lots of open positions at your company, it goes without saying that you have gaps to fill. There may also be skill gaps on teams that you assume are fully staffed. Part of marrying the right work to the right people is understanding where people can flex and adapt in the work they’re doing, to help plug gaps in other areas.
By going through this detailed process, you may realize that you have a team member who can shift their skills to another area of the business, and they may be better suited to that work. You may also identify teams that you thought were functioning well, but where additional skill sets or strengths are needed.
3 Be Flexible and Encourage Patience
Flexibility and patience are the name of the game in this current job market. If you embody flexibility as a manager, your team members will be more apt to follow your lead. If you’re encouraging employees to flex and adapt to fill gaps, be sure to communicate to them how you, too, are flexing to fulfill the needs of the business.
In addition, if you have lots of open positions, inform employees about the steps you’re taking to fill those positions, so that people who are carrying a larger load than they ought to at present understand that your goal is to help relieve them sooner than later.
In today’s job market, a little team reimagination strategy and playing to people’s strengths can go a long way in helping your company achieve its goals. Ask us how we can help you understand and design stronger teams.