On the last, I was talking about hiring a employee to start removing the menial tasks of your everyday routine. Today, we’ll talk about giving them the opportunities to grow into fully-fledged partners and experts in your team.
While it works similarly as if you were to grow in your company, helping a employee grow is like taking care of a business itself.
At the start, you have the “model” and “type” of employee you want, but that’s their limit. They already hit their first block, and the skills that they’ve honed before working with you is all you get. So the next step is to break that wall to realize their potential fully.
Today, I’ll share five things I did that can help you help your employee grow inside your company or business.
Before that; You have to be able to first communicate well with your employee.
The question is—can you and your employee communicate regularly?
These strategies and tips that I am about to share will only work depending on whether you and your employee have the means to communicate often. It can be through chat or email, video call, or just being able to talk at least once or twice a week.
In this case, you’ll be their acting mentor for you to instill the values you need in them. That way, when they’re ready, you have someone in your business that knows everything they have to.
This won’t work if you just hired someone to do a project and let them go. Or if the person you have in the team doesn’t want to grow at all.
With that said, it’s on with the strategies!
Learn what they’re strengths and weaknesses are.
This is one of the basic strategies you can start with, but it’s also one of the most significant you can work on together.
Everybody has their strengths and weaknesses. Something you might be good at can be somebody’s weakness and at the same time, something you might have no idea about can be straightforward for your employee.
Learn to share these kinds of information.
Ask each other what they like working on or what they would like to learn to be better at an aspect of the business.
Sometimes, we hire someone to do things and leave everything to them, but that shouldn’t be the case. Learning about someone can lead to more significant opportunities to understand each other and in turn, work better together.
Provide them with courses or books that can help them do their job better.
Once you know your employee’s weaknesses and where they can improve, you can start nurturing them just like nurturing your own business.
By providing them with materials, they can use to study, like books, courses, webinars to attend, to help them learn and improve on the things you want them to work on can be a great start.
Many people I’ve come across usually complain that their employees feel stagnant in a way or they’re not improving at a pace they wanted them too. This is because we don’t give them the means to improve.
We think that it’s their responsibility to improve themselves. In some ways, that is true, but you have to understand that it could be expensive for them to purchase these courses or books or they might not know personally what to improve on because you aren’t communicating with each other well.
It can get a bit hands-on, but if you invest in them, they’ll invest in you and your company too.
Be more understanding when they don’t get it.
Not everybody is the same, and this goes for learning too. There are things that people learn faster than others, and there are things that we can’t understand without guidance.
That’s also true when hiring employees for our company.
Sometimes, there are subjects or things that they don’t understand, and that’s normal. There’s no need to be furious with them. There are things you don’t understand either, right?
The best way to face this is to help them understand it. Your employee might not understand English as well as you or the problem might be difficult, and they need your guidance to know what to do precisely to face it.
Send them examples or send them to somebody else who’s already done it.
While it might seem like a chore to you as an employer who has many things in your hands, the employee you just hired isn’t the same person as you. Remember that.
Be as open as you can to them.
I’m not saying you have to tell them everything about your business or your day. When I ask you to be open to them, it means to be more transparent to them when it comes to working.
Because you have to help them grow, you can’t always be praising them throughout the whole journey. There are times when they make mistakes, and they will. And it’s your job to make sure they know it, and they have to improve on that.
Mistakes don’t mean they’ll get sacked or you’ll reprimand them. That’s usually what employees are scared of and in turn, start missing meetings, or they avoid you. This is the one thing you don’t want them to do.
The best way to face this is to tell them privately. Let them understand what happened and make sure they know where they did wrong. That way, you both understand what needs to be done the next time around. You can’t expect your employee (or even yourself) to be right all the time.
Instill the values you have on them.
Lastly, mold them into your image. Duplicate yourself onto your employee.
You might be scared that they could steal your ideas or start their own business but understand that there are people who don’t want to build their own business or they don’t want to deal with finding clients on their own.
Trust your employee, and they’ll trust you.
If you want to truly be able to duplicate yourself onto them, help them learn the things you know. Teach them; Coach them; Mentor them to create “another you”.
If you’ve been getting consistent $50K months all year round, imagine what two of you could do, right?
In summary, having a employee isn’t just a one-stop-shop to finding someone who can do what you want, and it’s all good. No. You have to invest in them, you have to help them learn, and you have to mould them to become the employee you need in your business.
If you’re interested in learning more techniques on how you can help your employees grow, you can visit us here!