7 Tips to Bring Out the Awesome in Your Employees

On this week's episode of Press Start Leadership Podcast, we discuss:

7 Tips to Bring Out the Awesome in Your Employees
Why It Is Always Better to Find Solutions vs Blame

Link to my FREE ebook: 5 Heroic Leadership Skills

Music by: Joey the Mad Scientist

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Transcript

Joey The Mad Scientist: 0:38

Hey there press starters and welcome to the press Start leadership podcast, the podcast about game changing leadership, teaching you how to get the most out of your product and development team and become the leader you were meant to be leadership coaching and training for the International game industry professional. Now, let me introduce you to your host, the man, the myth, the legend, Christopher Mifsud.

Christopher Mifsud: 1:07

Hey there, press starters and welcome back to another special edition of the press Start leadership podcast. On this week's edition, we'll discuss how to bring out the awesome in your employees and why it is always better to find solutions versus blame. First up seven tips to bring out the awesome in your employees raising unicorns. One of my favorite things is finding and developing top talent, aka unicorns. I've had the good fortune of discovering and training numerous unicorns. Throughout my career. Sometimes I helped prepare them for leadership roles. Sometimes different roles were better suited for their skills. But every single one of them made me proud to be a part of their journey. I like to think everyone is awesome, we're more precisely put, everyone has their own awesome to share with the world. Unfortunately, not everyone had a loving supportive family base that encouraged them to shine. Because of that I found many unicorns hiding among the horses ready to step out into the light. If you look hard enough, you'll find them too. How do you know when you found a potential unicorn? They may not always be the most confident, the most vocal or most outgoing, the most most of you will, but they will often be the kindest, wisest and most ingenuous. Overcoming what they lacked in harvesting what they have is the ultimate goal of a unicorn Wrangler. So look for the good traits and coach them through the rest. Some tips for raising unicorns, one, look for the best in everyone. Don't let your personal judgments prevent you from seeing the good in others. Everyone is awesome in their own way to genuinely care, like for real care about people. If you truly want others to succeed, you have to want the best for them. In some cases, that means putting the needs of others before your own. Remember, this is not about making you feel good. It's about making others feel good. That's your reward. Three, build trust. It's likely your hidden unicorns haven't heard the words of encouragement than you did before, or expects you to want something in return. This is all new for them. And trust takes time. So take the time to build their trust. For remember consistency. consistency is key. You have to be consistent and praise, mentorship and everything you do in order to build trust. Show up for them. Five, encourage them. Many unicorns in waiting hesitate to try something out of their comfort zone. Even if you know they can knock it out of the park. A lot of people have doubts, insecurities, and past experiences that keep them from striving for something more. Be patient and hype them up. Six, be sincere it's crucial to deliver on your promises. Don't commit to promotions, training or other goodies if you can't follow through. There are delays communicate them. So mentee feels informed and supported. empty promises do nothing but hurt the person on the receiving end. Seven. Be ready to consult them. There will be setbacks much like in your own journey, your unicorn may not get the shiny new role on the first try. This comes with disappointment and may set them back a bit be there to let them know it's okay and encourage them to keep trying. If you do all these things, you just might end up with a field full of unicorns. So start making some magic happen. And there you have seven tips to bring out the awesome in your employees. Do you have any tips on bringing out the best in your employees? Comment below. All right, next up. Why it's always better to find solutions versus blame. Choose solution oriented culture over blame culture. Over the years I've seen a lot of organizations face a lot of problems. And I'm always amazed when I see them jump into blame mode versus solution seeking mode. I've never seen the situation improved by finding someone to blame. It lowers morale and ignores the problem that still needs fixing. Organizations often spend too much time upfront asking How did it happen and who did it instead of how can we Solve it and who can solve it? It's wasted energy when they need to be moving forward. There's nothing gained from the negativity of blame culture. Usually an employee is already embarrassed, they made a mistake or worse, they're worried about keeping their job. Blame culture doesn't stop mistakes causes people to hide them. I've worked in a lot of companies were people were afraid to bring up mistakes, even though no one was in danger of being fired. management's reaction was always asking who messed up, which made people afraid and ultimately cause more problems? But Christopher, shouldn't I reflect on what went wrong? Yes, of course, but do it after the problem is resolved. And don't spend so much time analyzing what went wrong, that it takes away from the actual issues. Mistakes happen, where human and robot overlords aren't quite ready for us yet. So how do you find a good balance? Next time someone on your team makes a mistake? Follow these steps. One, solve the problem to do a root cause analysis. Three, check your processes for update everyone. Five, move forward. This process even works with repeated mistakes. After all, large scale issues can still be remedied with a solution. There are performance improvement plans, mentoring options, training programs, the sky's the limit. In a solution oriented culture, you set people up to come up with the solutions themselves. Something goes wrong. How do we fix it? You don't know who does when it's solved? How do we make sure we don't repeat it? It's important to constantly improve processes and people only by encouraging your team to solve problems and understand it's okay to have them. Do you catch the problems early over time, you also can train your employees to deal with problems largely on their own. I never mind when my employees bring problems to me, but I encourage them to have some solutions in their back pocket. My first question when I hear the problem is, how do we solve it? If you always provide the answer, people will expect you to do all the problem solving and in the end, it won't help you or them. Ultimately, you suffer greater issues and a culture of blame than in one of learning growth. So stop pointing the finger and start finding solutions together. And there you have, why it's always better to find solutions versus blame. Right and find more solutions. Give the podcast the following and my YouTube channel. That's this week's episode of press Start leadership podcast. Thanks for tuning in. And as always, thanks for being awesome. Give us a follow, like, share, and even review if you feel like we'd really appreciate it. Cheers. If you haven't downloaded my free e book five heroic leadership skills, click on the link in the description. Tune in next week for your next episode of press star leadership podcast. Thank you