Effective Management and Leadership: Tips for Painlessly Supporting Your Team’s Growth

Tips for Creating a Culture of Leadership and Growth in Your?Team

Management and leadership positions require a significant amount of time and effort dedicated to building leaders, supporting the team, and helping them achieve their goals. Individual goal-setting often takes a back seat to ensure the manager or leader can help others grow and succeed. This process can be daunting and time-consuming.?

I have repeatedly heard that managers do not have time for performance reviews or one-on-ones. Additionally, I have witnessed managers using their one-on-ones solely to follow up on projects. These managers are often too busy and lack access to the appropriate tools or templates. If this resonates with you, then you have come to the right place.

In fact, one-sided conversations, mixed messages, wordy documents, and poor processes often leave both parties feeling like they are having the same stressful conversation each time without making any progress. However, with the right approach and a good way to manage all these work performance reviews, one-on-ones, health check-ins, career growth plans, and other management activities become an awesome opportunity to reinforce solid habits, redirect poor traits, create a healthy culture and drive professional growth for your employees.

In this post, I will share tips from my experience as a director of product, marketing manager, and owner of a company to make the management and leadership process a lot less painful.

Let’s discuss some key activities you can implement to empower your team and foster a culture of leadership, growth, collaboration, and trust.

Define Expectations and?Success.

Start by meeting with your team to discuss how you or the company measures success and the key characteristics you value from team members. For instance, you may value independence and initiative. If these are key values in your organization, you will need to discuss how you will provide resources and space for employees to succeed.?

Next, discuss what key milestones and goals employees need to achieve in the next few months (6–12 months or more). This will help employees understand how they will be evaluated. You can also explain the benefits of achieving certain goals, such as receiving a bonus or a day off.?

Find some templates at Nova.

One-on-One Meetings.

One-on-one meetings give employees the opportunity to discuss their goals, growth, definition of success, and challenges with their managers in a safe space free of judgment. Managers are there to listen, support, and develop a plan to help employees achieve their goals. One-on-ones can have multiple formats, and each manager should have their own style.

A good way to start the meeting is by giving the employee the opportunity to lead the conversation:?

“What is one thing you are excited about related to today’s meeting?”?

“How is your energy today?”?

“How do you want to use this meeting?”

Other times, you may continue the conversation from the last meeting regarding the employee’s career plan or a way to reduce their stress. If the employee is not bringing a topic to the meeting, you can take the lead. Mix the questions and ask about things related to work, family and life. The intention is to show interest in their life and learn how to help them grow. You need to know who they are as a ‘human’ and not just who they are at work.

You can use a card deck to lead the conversation.?

This card deck offers over 100 questions you can ask during your one-on-ones.?

Alternatively, you can use one of our one-on-one templates that provide 4–5 questions to ask during a session. You can use them for inspiration, add additional questions, and keep all your one-on-one notes in one place.

Team Pulse Surveys or Health Check-Ins.

Team pulse surveys or health check-ins are a way for managers to monitor how their team is doing. It helps evaluate if there are any major issues or blockers that need to be addressed, and starts discussions on how the team can improve. Additionally, it provides a way to intuitively understand what is happening without having to be part of daily meetings and discussions. It also allows managers to monitor how recent changes are affecting the team in a positive or negative way.

To conduct a health check-in meeting or team retrospective, you can ask questions such as:

?“How do you feel about your energy levels at work right now?”

?“What is going well?”

?“What, if anything, is stressing you out?” and “What should we stop doing?”?

Alternatively, you can run an asynchronous health check-in or team retrospective by posing these questions on a collaborative platform where everyone can contribute and view each other’s responses.?

Another alternative is to send out quick surveys on a regular basis to monitor your team’s health.

Career Planning.

Assisting your team in building a career plan is an excellent way to support their growth. This allows for a discussion about how they can thrive and better utilize their talents, as well as understanding where they want to be in the next 3 to 5 years. With this information, you can easily create a plan and provide feedback based on their goals.

You can use our career plan and career growth survey on Nova to facilitate this process.

Management Survey.

One of the qualities of a good leader is the eagerness to improve and take feedback from their team to better approach them and provide solutions. Asking your team for feedback is an excellent way to exhibit such leadership qualities. You can send a feedback survey to your team, and even assure them of anonymity (by asking them to use an incognito window and a nickname) to provide feedback. Use the survey results to create a growth plan for yourself and have sincere conversations with your team.

It is essential to openly talk about your vulnerabilities and learning experiences as a manager. This approach will help you connect better with your team. Keep in mind that each manager’s management style will significantly affect how they use the feedback received.

Find our templates at Nova.

Self-check (for managers).

Evaluating one’s performance as a manager is not always easy, as managers usually have many responsibilities on their shoulders. Therefore, it is recommended that managers conduct their own self-check regularly. The self-check takes only two minutes and helps managers evaluate their performance.

Issue Log.

Creating a table where team members can add the challenges they face is an effective way to tackle them. You can address these challenges individually or as a team during a meeting.

Company Values.?

Discuss your company values with your team and find ways to make these values a part of the team’s daily work and culture (as a driving force of how people make decisions and work). It is also essential to monitor how your company culture is evolving over time. Moreover, you can use these values as a basis for your hiring process to find individuals who fit the company culture.

You can find a few templates at Nova.?

Team Norms and?Values.

It is essential to discuss the key values, norms, and commitments that will help your team succeed during a project. In addition, you can also discuss the rituals that can make the journey more enjoyable. Talk about the norms that create a fair space and a positive work environment for everyone. Discuss celebrations and things that each team member values when working with others.

This is an excellent way to connect with your team, discuss expectations, and understand how each team member can support one another. In my experience, these sessions are more effective than any team building games I have ever attended because they enable team members to discuss matters that truly matter and can positively impact their work.

We have multiple templates available on Nova, and you can even customize them to suit your needs.?

Give them a try!

Employee Performance Review?Survey

You often want to gather different perspectives about how other people at the company are experiencing working with a specific employee. To do that, you can send an employee performance review survey to key people who have worked with that person and ask them for feedback. This often helps managers provide more in-depth feedback during the employee performance review and get a sense of how this person works with other people.

There is a survey template available at Nova that can be customized.

Employee Performance Review.

Employee performance reviews often start with the manager going over the goals for that employee and thinking about some of the things they have done or can improve. It’s not always easy to think about a good way to measure how well an employee is doing, so I often recommend using a template like this.

Once the manager is done running that review, they will often have a meeting with the employee to chat about their experience in the last few months (or years) and provide some feedback. This is also an opportunity for the manager to evaluate why some things didn’t go as expected and where this person needs additional support.

Here is one of our 1:1 employee performance review meeting templates that you can use.

You can add additional questions and take notes. You can also set this as a recurring meeting and automatically prepare all the questions for you next time.

Give our tools a try! Learn more about Nova here

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This post was created by @RoFernn CEO and Co-Founder at Nova.