In a line: Productive team members bring positive results and they inspire others.

Sometimes you might have an ambitious team and well-defined goals but still, you start to see an uptick in turnover rates or a downturn in productivity.

Why does this happen?

Being a founder or CEO, it is your responsibility to create leaders, not followers. You want your team to achieve their short and long-term goals. When your team is small, it is easier to reach and run your mind and thoughts through each one of your team members. You can correct and motivate them individually.

What appears if one day you become unable to steer them?

The company or organization will expand as time passes so does the team strength. The cumulative responsibilities will not let the higher administrations monitor and motivate the team as they did in the past. So you want the same action plans and vision to run through your team exactly as the founder’s strategy operates.

When you are training your foremost team to consume and imprint your organizational vision and strategic actions, you are creating the next leader for the upcoming team members. So that you as a founder do not have to invest the same time and effort in the new members for them to exactly understand and get in progression with the organizational torrent.

Then what is the major quality a team member must develop to consume and sustain productivity even without external momentum?

Self-awareness!

Now, this is something a team member must try to develop. A self-awareness or self-consciousness of whether I am putting my complete effort into my team or whether I was productive enough for the team to achieve the tasks. A team member doesn’t need a management performance review to evaluate themselves.

Was I productive enough?

Am I adding value to my organization?

Did I use my time to bring the most result?

Is this a team task or an individual task?

What can bring a synergy effect?

These queries must run through a team member’s thoughts to become self-aware of their contributions. When you are creating such a member, you are creating a next-line leader who is an asset to your team. A leader must always inspire others to achieve the collective objective of the organization.

This is where the character of the team member matters. You do not need a leader with a lot of skills. A person can always upgrade the skill sets but the fire to forge positive changes around is hard to develop. So choose team members with that fire. They can make changes and they can bring results.

Managing the entire team to achieve a shared objective is hard. Creating a team of leaders who are self-aware of their contributions and who are always in sense of the organizational objective can emerge in a productive result. You cannot push productivity into them. You must inspire them to be self-aware of their potency. That’s the win.

Quick question: As a founder, it bothers when your employees perform poorly. What is the one hack/solution you found to inspire them?