‘Hot’ tactics for heating up your team

“Hot teams” improvise, do more work with less supervision and make the extra effort to follow through.

1. Don’t become rule-bound. Rules, intended to streamline and safeguard work, can hamstring your operation when common sense calls for exceptions. Before setting rules, ask if they’re really needed.

2. Don’t criticise in public. Embarrassing employees in front of the team will only come back to bite you. Mean bosses think that they’re holding people accountable, but what they’re really doing is inciting payback.

3. Show you care. If you like your people and show it, they’ll enjoy helping you when crunch time comes.

4. Listen. Make it one on one, as well as in groups. Listening helps you correct misinformation, relax barriers, increase trust and let people feel good about what they do for a living.

5. Make it their mission. Even when a project is not terribly exciting, you can make the work more engaging. Creating roles for each person, for example, gives people a sense of being special.

6. Let them decide. Allowing people to devise their own processes boosts morale. Just make sure those processes keep improving.