The business woman’s guide: tips to keep your team focused

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Being a business woman is not easy and you need to keep a lot of things under control, while others might question your power and abilities. In a society where the stigma around sexism and discrimination slowly goes away, you should be able to prove your worth by leading your team in an excellent manner. In order to do that, you may need to apply some tips and tricks. Some of them are listed in this article and should help you advance in your career. Keep in mind that every single detail counts, from ordering name badges for all your employees to organising team buildings. For the first one, you should take a look at Signomatic , a company that offers convenient ways to print badges for your employees. Even though it seems that such a step won’t make a difference, employees appreciate when they are being offered attention and resources, so you might want to rethink your options. There are many more other things you can do to improve productiveness in your team, including:

Teaching your team how to prioritise tasks
In a team, there might be members who are great at what they are doing but they can’t manage the tasks they receive the proper way. Because of that, you may need to deal with deadlines that are not respected or projects that are not finished on time and lead to losing a customer. If that’s your situation, you have to teach your team members how to prioritise the tasks they are given. The technique you should use is simplifying tasks in the ones that need to be finished within a month or less from receiving, deadlines that are due within one to three months and deadlines that are three months out.
After creating their own prioritise task road map, employees can decide if they are able to take more tasks into their custody or not. The reason why employees don’t respect deadlines usually happens because they take too many tasks and they don’t know when or how to say they are fully booked. Your job is to teach your team members some tips and tricks about planning. Both them and the company will have a lot to gain if deadlines are respected and everything stays organised.

Offering respect and recognition
Employees look for validation whenever they finish a task and it is your job as a good leader to offer them the respect and recognition they deserve. Without paying attention to the performances of each member of your team, you risk making them feel unimportant. When they reach that moment, they won’t continue to be as productive as before, considering that they didn’t gain any recognition for their efforts. This is the reason why you need to notice your team members whenever they accomplish something worthy of validation and of attention.
Discussing failures in a constructive manner is also highly important, instead of making your team members feel worthless for their mistakes. Offering respect and recognition will help your team members advance, which means the organisation itself will advance and your work as a team leader is going to be noticed as well. There is nothing but good things that can happen if you offer respect, recognition, and validation to your team members.

 

Encouraging personal growth over responsibility
In many cases, team leaders think that they should increase the responsibilities that an employee has in order to increase their overall productivity level. This is entirely wrong and you should stay away from such practices. Instead of increasing the responsibilities that a person has, you need to offer them a chance to perform better at what they are already doing. This means that their skills are improved, which leads to personal growth and satisfaction for the employee. Increasing responsibilities will only put the employee in difficulty and the quality of his work will be divided. Any responsibility should be treated as a change for personal growth. When the employees feel like they can handle more work or tasks that are more complicated, you can increase their responsibilities, but only then.
Productivity is not always about how much is done, but in what manner they are done. A company that delivers a lot of products of low quality will never be profitable, but a company that produces a few, high-quality products is definitely going to strive. This is the reason why you need to encourage your team to become better, to improve themselves, to improve the outcome of their work and so on. It is all about personal growth and offering support in the process.

Being transparent and trustful
Another thing you need to consider as a good team leader and business woman is to be transparent with your decisions. Being transparent will increase the level of trust that your team members and your employees have for you. Discussing the choices that you make with your team is going to make them feel pleased with the position they hold in the company, they will feel noticed and listened to. Whenever you have something important to decide, make it in a transparent manner and your employees will appreciate it. It’s not all about the actions you make towards your team members, but also the actions you make for the company.
Set meetings whenever you decide something that may influence the position of your team members in any way. Meetings are a great way to give people a chance to make themselves heard, to expose their ideas publicly and to actively participate in the decision-making process of the company. if you want to be transparent and trustworthy, you can’t make decisions behind the back of your team. They will feel marginalised which might be sensed in the overall level of productivity of the company. Your job as a team leader is to inform your team about the decisions you are about to make and the consequences these decisions have.

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