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Three Ways to Help Your Team Pursue Their Dreams

As a manager, it is highly important to recognize that most individuals on your team are not completely satisfied with the positions they currently possess. However, as important as recognizing this is, it is even more important to understand that this does not mean they don’t enjoy their positions but that they simply want to achieve more in their lifetime. Therefore, as a quality manager, it is crucial that you help your team to achieve their goals, even if it means they will be moving on past their current positions toward something more.

With this said, there are many ways to help support your team and watch them thrive in the process. Below are three ways to get you going down the right path toward a more supportive and caring managerial system right off the bat, including discovering their dreams, setting monthly goals, and motivating them to succeed. After all, a team that works together grows together, and those that move on to something more will never forget who helped them to get there either.

1. School, Promotions, Startups: Discover What Their Dreams Are

Some of the biggest aspirations many young individuals working for companies have are to go to college, move up in the ranks in their company, and potentially start their own business, with time. With this in mind, it is important that you, as a manager, respect their aspirations and help them to achieve them wherever possible.

Although this may not mean you should allow them weeks off at a time to study or time at work to try to pitch their new company to investors, you can easily help them by suggesting career paths, keeping them motivated, and teaching them what has made you successful over the years likewise.  

Furthermore, when it comes to school, suggesting career fields can be a wonderful way to bond with your team and help them create a future they are truly satisfied with. By looking at the current market, you can direct your team towards future careers that are flourishing and help them to formulate a life that is comfortable in the process. For instance, the tech industry has slowly risen to be one of the most successful industries in the market currently. With so many different focuses to choose from and an endless surplus of available jobs, it continues to be one of the most compelling careers to delve into as of today.

However, the tech industry does require full commitment, rigorous training, and various courses, which some of your team may not be fit to accomplish. In this case, another field that is currently flourishing is the auto industry. With newer models, unique sources of power, and different internal makeups, the auto industry is setting foot into the modern era and, with that in mind, auto mechanic jobs are flourishing.

By encouraging your employees to attend tech or automotive schools and training, you will not only help them to achieve their goals but also be happier and more productive in their current positions as well. In fact, studies show that a happy employee is over 12 percent more productive than one that feels stuck or unhappy in their current position.

Once you have helped them to recognize how to move forward in a company and how you pushed your own company upwards, they may seem a bit overwhelmed. However, this is where the second part of this encouragement plan comes into play. By creating monthly goals, your team can take steps toward their dreams one step at a time to ensure they don’t become overly stressed and choose to give up rather than succeed in the process.

2. Set Monthly Goals to Push Them Towards Said Dreams

As stated above, monthly goals can significantly help individuals looking to accomplish great things. For instance, by breaking down any particular goal into smaller, more achievable goals, you can help your employees to not get ahead of themselves and to focus on what’s most important at the time.

For instance, with our current financial crisis, it is quite common for young individuals to aspire to own their own homes yet find it extremely difficult to achieve this goal. Therefore, by breaking it down into reasonable chunks, you can help them to accomplish their dreams and do so in a reasonable amount of time as well. A good start to any breakdown would be to recognize the costs and what costs can be offset or removed, if possible.

In the case of a home, this could mean looking into the location desired and recognizing how much homes in the region run for. After this, you can begin to look into different ways to remove certain costs that come with owning a home. For instance, if your employee is a veteran, they may not realize that they qualify for a VA home loan, but this loan could help them to get their dream home in little to no time at all.

Although this is just one example, the foundation of assessing the costs and finding how to achieve these costs is still prevalent. However, your employees may still have a difficult time finding the drive necessary to achieve their seemingly insurmountable goals. This is where incentives come into play and transform these tasks into competitions any and all employees are guaranteed to want to participate in.

3. Motivate Your Team With Incentives and Encouragement

Perhaps the most crucial part to any managerial goal plan are the incentives. Although these may not be the company’s goals, by showing that you are supporting your employees and their dreams, you are creating employees that are loyal and feel respected. Furthermore, the cost analysis is fairly simple.

When analyzing the amount of money needed for simple incentives such as sunglasses, movie tickets, and company picnics in comparison to the sheer increase in sales caused by a more productive staff, it is clear that these incentives are mere drops in the bucket with a return value that is enticing for any manager.

Although there are many ways to use these incentives to motivate your team, having friendly monthly competitions, raffles, and out-of-work gatherings are great ways to become closer to your team, gain their respect in a positive way, increase their production levels, help them pursue and accomplish their dreams, and build a more connected and stronger company in the process.

In the end, it is always sad to watch your team separate and move past their current positions to something bigger and better. However, change and progression is a part of life and, as a quality manager, one of the most important things you can understand is that your part in their lives can and should be large — because being a leader isn’t about demanding results but creating results through understanding and motivation.