How to develop your employees for better performance and retention

Managers: How to Develop Your Employees in 10 Minutes a Week

Imagine for a moment that your employees were consistently improving their skills. And imagine if your employees were developing new capabilities. Sounds like a manager’s dream come true, doesn’t it? Employee development sounds incredibly attractive. But bosses have already got so much on their plates so when are they meant to find the time to develop their employees? And besides employee development sounds like one of those things that HR does.

Now HR does have a role to play in employee training and development. But what I want to share with you is why effective managers take ownership of their employees development. And if you can spare 10 minutes a week then I can show you how you can improve your employees skills and capabilities. And why your employees will love you for it.

How Effective Managers Use Employee Development as a Management Tool

The secret to manager success is that managers succeed when their employees succeed. Effective managers don’t try to be the super hero boss who does everything themselves. Effective managers know how to get the best from their employees. And employee development is one of the tools that you can use to improve employee performance.

PS: Are you looking to Develop Your Own Manager Skills? This article includes extracts from the online training course: How to Develop Your Employees. Are you responsible for the performance of employees as a manager or as someone who works in HR? Find out how to develop your employees in just ten minutes a week.

How Developing Employees Increases Employee Motivation & Retention:

• Your employees want to feel like they are learning and growing,
• Your employees like to do work that they are good at, and
• Your employees want to know that you care about them enough to invest in their future

Did you ever have a teacher, mentor or a coach that helped you to grow? Did that help you to reach your potential? If so, don’t you think it’s time that you played the same role to your employees?

Tip: Help your employees to help themselves by assigning the “How to Develop Yourself” course to them.

What About the Time?

Obviously more capable and motivated employees make your job as a manager easier. But because so many managers are snowed under with work I just wanted to speak about finding the time for development.

Some managers think that they don’t have the time to develop their employees. But effective managers know that investing in employees saves them time because:

• Skilled employees make fewer mistakes that managers have to fix,
• Skilled employees know how to do their job faster and
• Managers can manage their workload better when they upskill their employees to support delegation. (See related resource: Ultimate Guide to Delegation)

The 10 minute, Step by Step, Coaching Process

1. Secure your employees motivation and commitment to the development process,
2. Help your employee to identify development opportunities,
3. Collaborate to set performance improvement goals. (TIP: don’t set training goals, set performance goals to ensure that the development results in a business benefit),
4. Collaborate to identify training resources. (TIP: Check out the Go1 marketplace as a starting place because there’s a wide variety of affordable training solutions),
5. Collaborate to agree on an action plan (TIP: Help your employees to find development time by agreeing on development time slots, see this video for how this works),
6. Track your employees process and keep your employee on target (TIP: Don’t solve your employees problems for them, use Active Listening Skills to encourage them to solve their own problems),
7. Recognise achievements and follow up

Related resource: If you want more detail on how to do this then look at How to Develop Your Employees.

Have Confidence in Your Manager Skills

Managing employees is a difficult job, especially when so few managers are trained in the essential management skills. Improving your manager skills will give you confidence in your management ability. And I can tell you that when you help your employees to learn and grow, it feels pretty awesome too.

Developing Employees as An Essential Manager Skill

So now that you’ve seen how developing employees improves employee performance you’ll see why I consider developing employees to be one of the Essential Manager Skills. It’s tempting to leave development in the hands of HR. But I believe it’s worth taking an active and regular interest in developing your own employees. After all - it’s you as the manager who gets the benefit of a skilled team.

Next Steps:

Thanks for making it to the end. If you are a manager and found this useful, this article includes material from the course How to Develop Your Employees Find out how to develop your employees in less than 10 minutes a week. This course includes coaching worksheets and a script to secure your employees commitment to the coaching process.

The Go1 platform has got several features that make developing your employees easier. Find out more about how to use these features in the Getting Going with Go1 course