Agreeing to Succeed

If you want your employees to succeed, and want to create a culture that is mutually beneficial, so that it is a win-win situation, you have to use leadership skills. One of the best things you can do as a leader to inspire and encourage the best performance from your employees is to get to know them, their talents, passions, and desires, and use those to create an agreement for success. In other words, work with your employee to put together a mutually contracted agreement that will clarify your expectations, and determine the outcomes, processes, and consequences of your employees performance. Here's what that agreement should entail:

1. Desired results- What do you want to accomplish and when? List goals and measurements, as well as a timeframe. This should be discussed between manager and team, and both should contribute to the plan for what goals will be sought after. The time frame in which they will be accomplished, and how the success will be measured. If you create this together it will be clear, and there will be no question about what is expected.
2. Guidelines- How will you accomplish your goals? What standards and conditions will be met? In most businesses there are things that need to be done and conditions that must be met. As you set goals, also set up the conditions and guidelines followed to meet those goals so that no short cuts are taken or corners cut.
3. Resources- What people, budgets, tools, and materials will be used to meet goals? Be sure to provide adequate resources. This is huge, an employee will feel more prepared for success if they know that they will be allotted the items they will need in order to meet their goals. If you do not give them the right resources, how can they succeed?
4. Accountability- How will you account to one another on progress? Set up times, or create some kind of spreadsheet to use for performance reviews and accountability. Figuring out how accountability will be measured will help improve performance and encourage accountability with both manager and employee, which is a huge part of success.
5. Consequence- How will each party benefit from the agreement? What happens if the agreement is not fulfilled? What every manager needs to make clear is that they are on the line as well as the employee, it can be win-win or fail-fail. They are on the side of the employee and want to ensure their success, but this requires both parties to understand what the consequences will be if the goal is not met. Are jobs in danger? Pay cuts? A negative performance evaluation? What the consequence is matters much less than that it is clearly defined BEFORE embarking on the journey to the goals.

Have a conversation with your team and agree with one another to succeed. It will make it far more likely to occur, as everyone will know what is expected of them, and how that will be measured.