Enjoy CONSTANT IMPROVEMENT in Your Team

A 1% improvement in your team in one month? In some cases that would be nice…but actually not that big a change. But what about a 1% improvement every month? What would that be worth to you? Purely numerically, if you keep improving by 1% each year, those improvements start to compound on each other and, in just over 3 ? years, you’ll have a 50% improvement. If you think in terms of productivity, sales, speed or any other measure of your team’s performance, I imagine a 50% improvement would be quite attractive!

In any team I’ve come across, there’s one thing in particular that can be systematically implemented to deliver that type of constant and never-ending improvement. Regular training. It really is that simple. Just ensure that all team members are undertaking training frequently.

In some cases, that can be larger scale, external training. Team members can go away and attend a course – there are courses on most subjects and of most lengths. Short courses, multi-year courses and just about anything in between.

However, in most cases, the training required to keep improving your team is much closer at hand, requires much less investment and can be implemented more immediately and constantly. Training among your team.

In my experience, the most reliable way to ensure that your team continues to improve is to ensure that they continue to train each other, on topics that are relevant to all, or most, of them. For example, in the last couple of businesses I’ve built, we’ve maintained a schedule of training the team once each fortnight for two hours each time.

The topics can be scheduled well in advance and might cover three broad areas:

1. Skills and activities that are specifically part of this team’s responsibilities; for example, a sales team doing training on sales skills;

2. Broader knowledge and skills relating to the industry, the whole company or other aspects of your wider strategy; for example, any team doing training on the latest developments in their industry; and/or

3. Habits and behaviours that are relevant to most people; for example, time management, planning or deep thinking.

Once you have some topics mapped out for the next Quarter, you can then also think about the different formats the training might take. Perhaps it would begin with you simply training the team on activities that you have the most understanding of. Over time, this will become a little repetitive, possibly not very exciting and somewhat limited. At that point, consider having any member of the team train the others on an area of particular strength. In addition, some topics will lend themselves to undertaking an activity together as a team, or perhaps just discussing it together as a team. Or watching a video of a team member doing that thing well and critiquing them. Or watching a Ted Talk on the topic. Or plenty of others!

Every one of those tactics is free and available to anyone. It simply requires you to plan a little (in fact, a very little) and to commit the time as a team to actually improving.

Of course if you commit to doing one training session, or perhaps two, that is unlikely to make an enormous change. However, if you keep training and developing as a team, month in and month out, it will start to add up. In fact, new training will start to compound on improvements already made. Over a year or two or three, the improvement is likely to be dramatic. Best of all, this can be systematically implemented as a team and need not depend on any individual…and certainly not on you.

In the end, implementing this is incredibly straightforward and, done properly, will always work. You simply need to decide to start. Alternatively, you can allow your team to stagnate and not improve. Clearly its quite an easy decision….so get on with it!