5 Ways to Boost Your Team's Commitment to Their Jobs (AND You)

For any manager overseeing a team, it's challenging to balance individual needs and collective goals, while also ensuring that everyone feels motivated/supported and committed to the job.

But there are a few easy tips that every supervisor can use to boost team engagement, commitment and morale:

1. Show them what you’re working on: if you're assigning pieces of your project to your supervisees, show them how their individual portions contribute to the overall project e.g. if I have a staff member do some research on a specific marketing technique, I show them how that research will be used in a larger presentation on improved membership marketing.
2. Explain how their goals fit into the overall goal: Whether you set goals for individuals on your team or they set their own, show them how those goals align with your departmental goals and the organization's overall goals. While this might seem obvious, you'd be surprised how many managers assume their team gets it, without actually checking.
3. Teach them something: Employees want to feel that they work for someone that knows a little more than they do either in the subject matter specialty or in overall management. Teach your team members how to do something, whether it's how to troubleshoot a problem, develop crisis-communication to senior management to address a specific issue that arose, etc.
4. Learn something from them: Conversely show your team that you respect their knowledge and work by having individuals on the team teach you how to do something. More often than not, managers don't know everything that each individual on their team does. By taking the time to learn, you're not only showing your supervisees that you respect them, but it also shows that you're humble and curious to learn.
5. Show that you’re impartial: No matter how objective you consider yourself, it's inevitable that you'll get along better with one or two of your supervisees more than the others: maybe they think similarly to you, or challenge your thinking in a way that you appreciate. Therefore it's important to challenge yourself to identify your partiality- are you being fair to every person on your team? Are you judging some more harshly than others? Are you demonstrating your fairness to your team? Seemingly minor issues like the perception of your fairness can affect how committed your team is to you and the work at hand. So make it a point to show and explain how you're being fair to everyone on your team. Hold everyone equally accountable.

Try a couple of these tips today, and see how that affects your team's performance and commitment to their work, and you.

--

Mishri Someshwar helps entrepreneurs and senior business leaders craft effective speeches, conference presentations, and anything else they need to sound good in front of investors, colleagues, conference attendees, and more. Past clients include startup founders, sales VPs and C-suite leaders. To get her tips on how to communicate more effectively, click here.