How Much Do You Know About What Your Team Members Can Do?

There’s  a lot to do when you’re a manager. Understand corporate objectives. Build a team. Be a leader. Get stuff done. All good things managers are supposed to stay on top of. But one thing often eludes many well-meaning and talented managers.

Get to know the capacity and capability of every team member and help them deepen and broaden their knowledge and skills.

In this time of rapidly changing objectives, old jobs disappear and new ones appear practically overnight. Unfortunately, that has led to the mass layoffs of existing workers and hiring of brand new ones. Why?

Often it’s because managers don’t know enough about the true capacity of their onboard workers to do anything other than what they’ve been doing. When a new job is posted, an applicant from outside, armed with a fresh resume, paradoxically has an advantage over someone who’s been with the company awhile. Incumbent workers get labeled with the description of the job they’ve been doing, and are habitually overlooked for new and different assignments inside the company.

That means the company is constantly losing associates who know the system and taking on the training of brand new people, perhaps unnecessarily.

What can you do as a manager to stem the tide of the loss of experienced workers?

• Give people a chance to do different things.
• Send your team members on loan temporarily to another unit.
• Borrow another manager’s team members for temporary assignments.
• Create Work Agreements with full time people similar to consulting contracts you’d enter into with strangers. Specify the job you want done, measures of success, knowledge and skills required going-in, expectations for knowledge and skills gained as a result of the assignment, people with whom the person will have to interact. Then do an after-action report after every assignment to document what happened. Keep it handy in case the person’s job is eliminated or for when a job appears in another area.
• Publicize success stories when someone does something new with great results.

Most importantly, make sure every associate knows it’s the responsibility of every worker to broaden and deepen their knowledge and skills and to let others know about their progress.