How A Manager Can Determine Which Team Members Are The Most Productive

Not all employees are productive, do you know which ones are?
Not all employees are productive, do you know which ones are?
Image Credit: Phil Whitehouse

As a manager, you have a team of employees who work for you. You’d like to think that you are getting 100% out of everyone on your team each and every day. However, you realize that even with your manager skills this is probably not the case. This then leads to the big question, of the people who are on your team, who are the most productive? How is a manager supposed to determine this?

Productive Team Members Start With Goals

During my career I have seen a lot of people get ahead because they always seemed to be busy. However, if anyone had taken the time to look at what they were working on, they would have discovered that they were pretty much wasting their time. Making an effort without having a purpose for that effort, is simply effort. The productive members of your team don’t just know what they should be doing – they also know why they should be doing it.

Your most productive team members will all have long term goals that they are working towards. Additionally, they will have short term goals that support their long term goals. These members of your team have purpose–and that purpose guides everything they do. That’s why these people appear so dedicated and organized and consistently on-task. They’re not slaves to a routine; they’re simply driven to reach their goals and they are quick to eliminate roadblocks and put aside distractions that may stand in their way.

Productive Team Members Create Systems

Having goals is only the start for your productive team members. They understand that the goal of your manager training is to build a successful team. That team is going to consist of a set of processes that allow it to accomplish great things. Your most productive team members are going to be the ones who realize that a goal is going to be a good way to both plan and map out what success for the team will look like. However, a system is going to be needed in order to make progress towards that goal.

Your productive team members are going to know that a goal can provide direction for the work that needs to be done. In fact, a goal can even push them forward in the short term. However, these are the team members who realize that eventually a well-designed system will always win. Every team has goals; committing to a system makes all the difference in being able to achieve that goal.

Productive Team Members Ask For Help

You might think that your most productive team members know it all. If this is the case, then they should not have to take time away from what they are working on to go get help from someone else. If this is what you think, than you’d be wrong. It turns that even people who are busy need to find the time to ask for help getting something done.

It turns out that the productive members of your team ask for help not just because they need help but also because by asking they show respect for the other person and trust his or her experience, skill, or insight. As a manager you need to understand what is going on here. Mutual respect is the foundation of every solid relationship–and the best way to create mutual respect is to first show respect. The productive people on your team will ask for help in order to create and deepen their relationships with other people on the team.

What All Of This Means For You

As a manager you’d like to be in use your team building to create a team that is able to accomplish the most. In order for this to happen, you are going to need to have productive people on your team. The challenge that you are facing is that you do have productive people on your team, but who are they? A manager needs to know how to spot the productive ones.

Productive members of your team stand out because they always start with goals. They not only know what they should be doing, but also why they should be doing it. Once they know what their goals are, they take the time to create systems. They do this because they realize that systems are what will drive the team going into the future. Productive team members are not too busy to ask for help. They realize that they don’t know everything and they’ll reach out to team members who have experience that they don’t. By doing so, they’ll also help to show respect and deepen relationships.

As a manager you want to make every member of your team be a productive team member. However, you are going to have to focus your efforts on those team members who are not being productive. This means that you need to know who is currently doing it right. Study your team, know who is your most productive, and then get everyone else to do what they are doing and you’ll have a productive team.

– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: How can a manager make less productive workers more productive?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So manager, where are the members of your team? If you are like most managers, the answer to this question has a number of different answers. Some of your team members are probably in the office working just down the hall from you. However, other members may be working from home. It turns out that there is a change going on in the workplace right now – those at home workers are being brought back into the office. Is anyone going to have the manager skills in order to be ready for this change?