It’s been a while since I last posted in our video series focusing on ideas for employee growth and development, so I’m back with Tip #15. Today’s advice: give your employees the tools and resources they need to succeed.
Set your people up to succeed by giving them the tools and resources they need
As leaders, we give our employees tasks to complete and obligations to fulfill. But occasionally, without meaning to, we inadvertently set them up to fail. “How?” you ask? We do it by giving them the responsibility for the job, BUT not giving them the authority or the resources they need to get the job done.
So we ask an employee to process invoices online but it takes three days for him to get the system access he requires to do it. We’ve set him up to fail.
We bring a new employee on board but there is insufficient time to get her fully trained to do what she needs to do. We’ve set her up to fail.
A staff member is responsible for conducting inventory in the warehouse, but rather than giving him a handheld scanner, we hand him a notebook and a pencil, and tell him to do a manual count. We’ve just set him up to fail.
We ask our sales reps to represent our company at an upcoming sales conference, but we forget to advise the organizers who will be attending. We’ve set our people up to fail.
When you give substandard or no resources, you set employees up to fail!
I think you get the idea. When we don’t give our employees the tools they need to get the job done, or we give them substandard resources, what we’ve done, inadvertently perhaps, is set them up to fail. If we really want to see employee growth and development, we need to set our people up to succeed. We need to give them the tools they need to be effective and efficient.
So as a leader, see yourself as a facilitator. Ask your people what they need to grow and develop, and then provide the fuel to make the wheels turn. If you don’t, while it may be unintentional, you are setting them up to fail.
Are you giving your people responsibility for their jobs, AND giving them the authority and/or the resources they need to get the job done? Please share your successes and horror stories, either as a leader, or as an employee?
Previous video blogs in this series on developing and growing your employees were:
- Establish a formal mentoring program
- Create employee engagement by monitoring performance metrics
- Or just access the whole series in our Video Archives