Kick-Start Your Team’s Productivity Push for Autumn
September has arrived, and your year-end push begins!
We hope you took some time to enjoy a summer holiday, and took our advice to make your vacation a REAL vacation. Evidence is strong that truly disconnecting from work regenerates energy, clarity and passion.
As leaves fall, productivity rises. Take steps to harvest and focus that energy!
Time to put your restored energy and passion to work:
- September and October are the months to make real progress, setting up November as “final push” month for those projects (or project phases) that should be finished this year.
- Plan to reach accomplishments in late November. Consider late November and much of December as a time to focus on final steps.
- December is a month to tie up loose ends, clean up messy endings, and ramp up your team for a productive start to 2015 in January.
How can you start September well, launching your team into the Fall full of aligned, passionate action?
- Run an Autumn Organizing Event. Revisit plans with each team member and with the group. Sniff out projects that may have suffered from summer doldrums and set them back on the rails.
- Gather lessons “learned and forgotten.” What wisdom did everyone collect over the summer? What perspectives may have been gained? What lessons may have not yet been leveraged to improve team productivity or service delivery? Nail down the next steps needed to accomplish that.
- Place a value on time away. Explore what angles and perspectives may have come to people who successfully disconnected from work. Their minds did not shut off – capture where they are now that they have been refreshed.
- Reset priorities, and progress points. What is realistic for the next 90 days? Gain agreement on what is possible, and what should be deferred?
- Connect your team to resources and people. What does your team need to facilitate their success? Making this happen is one of your roles as a transformational leader, so make the effort to find out what really needs to happen. Don’t assume you know, or that what you knew six months ago is still true.
- Share your revised plans of action with your bosses. Even better: Get them involved in the plan redevelopment and relaunching process.
- Review each employee’s personal development plan. What did you two agree to when you last sat down to discuss their personal development? What did each of you promise to do to meet your agreement? What progress have each of you made? Where are the gaps that still need filling? Where must you go from here to ensure a great year-end review for the employee?
Does all this make sense in your environment? How are you going to reset and restart your team next week for the “Fall Productivity Period”? Which of these tools will you utilize?
Let us know how we can help. Your success is our mission, too!
Click here for more about leadership habits we recommend as areas of focus.
Call Brooke or Dave for a deeper discussion about how to kick-start your employee engagement habits for the balance of 2014.
Remember our Leadership Mantras for 2014:
- Nothing succeeds like a team taking aligned, passionate action!
- No one leads you as well as you lead yourself.
