 Knowing your team as a manager gives you huge advantages in step-changing team performance. When you know how to best utilize the skills, character and experience of each individual team member, overall team performance will increase, sometimes very significantly. Every company wants and needs its managers to improve team performance. The company's ability to survive and thrive depends on it. Unsurprisingly there is a lot of pressure to perform place to managers, with great rewards for those that deliver and job insecurity for those that don't. How can you improve team performance without unearthing all the talents and abilities of the people you depend on to improve that team performance? In my experience easily 70% plus of managers don't spend enough time really getting to know their team members, resulting in a superficial understanding of who they're working with and what they can do. This guarantees you'll be an average manager or worse. Gain a massive management advantage by really knowing your team. Today you're learning firstly three big management advantages gained by knowing your team, secondly seven essential areas to learn more about your team and third five key actions to step change team performance. Learn my most valuable tips on how best to get to know your team in seven different areas vital to understanding enough about each team member to get the most out of your team. My name is Jess Coles and if you're new here in Hearts.Training shares people management expertise, resources and courses teaching you how to build high-performing teams. I've included links to additional videos and resources in the description below as well as the video timestamps so do take a look at these. And if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. Firstly let's go through why you should put some serious effort into learning about your team members. Three big management advantages gained by knowing your team. There are at least three big management advantages gained by knowing your team well and these are firstly best use of team strengths and appreciation of team weaknesses, secondly building stronger relationships with team members and third creating high levels of trust within the team. Gain all of these and you should increase team performance. I'll quickly explain the why for each. Take any team and each person on that team is different. Each want different things and have different interests and motivations. Each will come from different backgrounds, have different experiences, assumptions, beliefs and life references. When you know the strengths and interests of each person on your team you can adapt your approach, your management style and how you communicate so that you improve how you work with them. You can also assign work that is more likely to interest them, play more to their strengths and create opportunities to further develop their skills. These actions create significant advantages for the team over time in more motivated and skilled individuals who get more done in the time available. Secondly by making the time and effort to really get to know the individuals on your team you are demonstrating your interest in them, showing you care about their hopes and dreams, what they want to get from work and their motivations and interests. Who doesn't appreciate a boss who's trying to look after their employees? Being able to play to team members strengths more often than not also builds appreciation within the team for you personally and your skill as a manager. All these factors help strengthen the relationships you have with team members. In thirdly by playing to strengths and communicating why you're assigning different types and levels of work to individuals within the team you'll build the team's trust in your ability as a manager. Trust in you as a person is built through the care you take to help and develop team members, inflexing your style and approach to their needs, in working to help them realise their ambitions. High levels of trust within the team and between you and the other team members results in better teamwork, coordination and support. These in turn driving increasing team performance. There are significant advantages that managers should aim to gain through knowing their teams well. Managers are responsible for increasing team performance, playing to strengths, stronger relationships and more trust all improve team performance. Next how do you as a manager find out more about your team members? Knowing your teams I've got seven essential areas to help you learn more about your team. The seven areas that I look to understand about each of my team members are firstly the extent and level of their skills, secondly their judgment and decision making, third their character and values, fourth what energy levels they have, fifth their ambitions and dreams, sixth how they're reacting different situations and then seventh their desire and ability to learn. For each I share what I typically do for each team member to discover more about each of these important areas. So firstly for skills the best way I know to assess skills is to put team members in different situations and observe how they get on. I ask what individuals think they are good at and what they enjoy doing in one-on-one meetings with them. By asking what they think and observing what they do I also find out a bit more about their self-assessment skills. I'm looking to understand the breadth of each person's skills and how strong they are in each skill. I also want to have a gauge of each person's skill relative to the other team members. Second the better a person's judgment and decision making in general the more autonomously I let them work and the more hands-off management style I will use. There are lots of ways to assess a person's judgment and decision making. Here are three examples include firstly outlying current problems and asking them to talk me through how they would make a decision. Secondly coaching them through decisions that they should make as part of their role. And third asking them to make decisions about real problems and then explain why they chose that option. To find the level where they are comfortable making decisions I generally increase the complexity of the decision making or the scale of the impacts of the decisions until you need to coach them through their decisions so they don't lose confidence. Know where they are comfortable and know where they need to start getting support. Third learn about a person's character and values through their behaviors the decisions that they take and the actions that they do. Pay closer attention to what each of your team members do and how they go about it. You know how they approach their work their colleagues you etc their actions will speak volumes about their character and values. Fourth energy levels are really important. Those with high energy levels are more likely to work hard, seek challenges and have opportunities to learn and grow and increase skills etc. They simply have more capacity to do tasks that use energy versus a person with lower energy levels. Observation of what each person does and how they do it should give you a very good idea of each person's energy levels. Fifth when you can align a person's ambitions and dreams with tasks and activities you need them to do you'll have a very motivated person who will try to do a good job. Build trust and then ask each individual to share their ambitions with you. Follow this up by doing your best to get alignment between the needs of what needs to be done and what they want to do. Sixth observe how team members react in different situations. How are they at dealing with pressure? What people skills do they have? How resilient are they to knocks and setbacks? How do they learn and adapt? What are they like with change? Pay careful attention to what each person does and how they react in different situations. Listen for their emotions when they are talking about different situations and events. It will get some worked up and what do they come about etc. And seventh knowing each individual's desire and ability to learn is also very important within a team setting. Your businesses are constantly changing. To deliver improving team performance we need to help the team adapt and flex to those requirements. To achieve this at team level we need to work with the individuals and help them learn as quickly as they're able to matching teaching to learning styles. Create situations to test the learning ability of individuals ask them what they think and observe their reactions to learning situations. I hope you appreciate that there is a bit of work involved in finding out about each of these areas with your employees. Make the time to work closely with each of your team members spend time with them in meetings in problem solving activities etc so that you can create the opportunities to observe them in action. Great managers know their team members in quite a bit of detail. This gives them a big advantage over average managers who don't understand their teams as well. So now I'm going to take you through five key actions to step change team performance. Know your team's strengths and weaknesses and you can start to harness all the strengths in the team and minimize exposing their weaknesses. Playing to strengths nearly always increases overall performance and there are several key actions to take to harness strengths on an individual level which in my view are firstly organize the right people into the roles that best suit their individual strengths. This can take a bit of time cross-training and explaining particularly if people are in unsuitable roles to start with. Secondly reorganize roles to maximize the number of tasks and activities that play to the strengths of the person doing each role. Third think carefully when you are delegating work. Align as much work as possible with individuals respective strengths interests and ambitions. And fourth plan out how you're going to develop team members what skills they need to develop or improve to further maximize the overall team's output. And then fifth explore how you might outsource work recruit in or borrow individuals to cover skill gaps in your team including yourself. Take as many of these actions as you can to play to the strengths of your team and cover any weaknesses that the team has. All of these actions will improve team performance over time. So in summary great managers know their teams and to get the most out of your team you must know your team's strengths and weaknesses. You can only really achieve this by putting in the time and effort to get to know your team members while working alongside them. From personal experience I know the investment you put in is paid back many times over in increased trust, stronger relationships, higher motivation levels and ultimately in increased team performance. To recap we've covered three big management advantages gained by knowing your team. Secondly we've covered seven essential areas to learn more about your team and lastly we've had covered five actions to step change team performance. If you have any questions on 12 actions to step change team performance through knowing your team please leave a comment below and I'll get back to you. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.