You only need one leadership strategy to be successful.  

PEOPLE

The only leadership strategy that you need is a people strategy. Every other strategy will mean nothing if you do not have the right people, the best people and skilled people to implement any strategy.

I have worked in retail management for over 18 years and learned that nothing is more important than people. No matter how good you are, if you have a team that does not follow your leadership, you are not as good as you think. We have all heard the saying, “work smarter not harder,” when you focus on getting results by taking care of your people, you are working smarter. If you don’t focus on taking care of your employees, I promise you are working a lot harder than you have to.

It drives me crazy to see managers that only focus on results and bypass the people who are responsible for helping you to achieve those results. I know how it feels to considered a result and not person, which is why it drives me crazy when I see it because I know what it feels like. Guess what? It’s not a good feeling.

Here is a simple plan that will help you with your most important strategy to improve performance and get results.

1. Show appreciation: Take the time to let your employees know that you appreciate their hard work and their efforts. You will not believe how far a complement of encouragement will go and how much more the employee will be willing to do because of appreciation.
2. Recognize small contributions: When you publicly or privately recognize your employees contribution, it will automatically lift morale and you gain trust. In today’s market, employees are doing the work of two people and sometimes three.
3. Collaborate: When you involve your employees in the decision-making you gain more buy-in from them. You can tell them what to do but if you ask them what should be done, you will increase the productivity of that employee because they will work to prove that was the right decision since they were apart of it.

These are three simple actions for you as a manager to take that will pay you back ten fold in productivity. As leaders it is easy to get focused on reports, key performance indicators, spreadsheets, conference calls, action plans and on and on, but in all of that don’t forget about taking care of your people.

If you take care of them, they will take care of you.

Go INgage your team,