Performance Improvement – A Matter of Expectations

The best leaders, supervisors, and managers of employees understand that their team members frequently live up or down to the expectations set for them. One way to encourage employees to live up to performance expectations is to encourage and support ongoing self-evaluation and professional development.

Professional development is tantamount to success for the following reasons:

• It ensures that your team members gain – and retain – valuable career knowledge, tools, and skills. Encourage employees to view personal development and training as a required component of career development. Instead of mandated training, which may be perceived as boring or unwanted, team leaders should tailor lively, interactive classes and seminars that reinforce and support positive workplace behavior.
• Professional development should not be viewed as a one-shot-deal. It should be presented as the ongoing pursuit of new goals, self-improvement, and performance growth. At its finest, it encourages professional growth, reduces employee turnover, and outlines appropriate and expected next steps.
• Professional development encourages effective goal-setting, establishes performance milestones, and should make room for mentor-mentee relationships between high performing and sometimes struggling team members. This peer-to-peer approach to personal development strengthens teams and encourages healthy sales and performance competition.
• Continuing professional development is vital to sales organizations because it encourages employee competency, provides career support, and identifies potential team leaders. It’s an ongoing process that should remain in place throughout each team member’s career.
• Professional development is another valuable component of feedback. It is prized because it offers employees critical feedback from objective sources that can paint a clear picture when coupled with routine workplace feedback.

Leaders and managers must make a concerted effort to establish clear employee and performance expectations. Professional development, consistent feedback, and clearly communicated benchmarks are a strategic way to command excellence in all facets of your organization. It couples practical experience with professional education and advancement that benefits both the employee and the organization.

At the core of business success- across disciplines, across industries- lies a handful of truths, best practices, and strategies we must follow as business leaders to achieve the results we seek.

@TheCORE was designed to explore these truths, to take a deeper look into the success strategies of today’s industry leaders, and to examine the key factors that lead to live-long performance improvement. Visit us today www.thecoreresults.com