- Learn Everything There Is to Know about Your People - Make it a point to learn all there is to know about your people. Know their first name, their spouse names, their children's names, about their family's concerns and joys, and so on. You need to connect at a personal level. Do not, for one moment, think that this is easy. You need to do this with genuine interest and emotional involvement or it will be perceived as an intrusion or inquiry.
To connect you have to nurture it as a two-way relationship. In other words, you have to open up as well. Sharing time and issues about your family makes you look more human and less archaic - and generate a close and loyal bond with your people.
- Generate and Instill Mutual Trust - For your people to give 200% to their job, they should trust you implicitly. To reach that level of trust, you should start by trusting them completely until they prove otherwise. You need to nurture a culture of mutual trust not only from you to them and them to you, but also horizontally. When team members/work colleagues trust one another there is no scope for professional jealously, sabotage, or inefficiency.
The whole office would work as a seamless team, one stepping to complete what the other misses out so the end-product/result never suffers. The goal of the whole team becomes one with that of the organization. You need a lot of patience to reach this level, but it is so worth the trouble.
- Develop Strategies to Cash in the Existing Talent - Nobody is perfect. However, in a team you can get as close to perfection as is humanly possible provided you use one of the best attributes of a leader, i.e. using people according to their strengths. Take your time and ascertain the strengths and weaknesses of each individual in your team. Break up every task in such a way that each person can use their strengths to contribute. It takes great people skills to achieve this level of strategizing, but when you achieve it, you will be unstoppable.
This strategy will generate a great feel-good factor among the people who will start looking at themselves as valuable members of the organization, and as a result will compete with each other to do better and better.
