Tips for Maximizing Employee Potential

As a manager, maximizing employee potential should be one of your top priorities. Disgruntled, idle workers who do the bare minimum are dead weight for your company. Each employee you hire should be considered an investment in the company. Being able to push your employees to the maximum potential (without breaking them, of course) will enhance your entire company’s productivity and efficiency. Here are some ideas to help your workers be the best that they can be – and not hate you in the process.

Hire the Right People

First and foremost, recruit the right people! This seems simple and silly, but more often than not employers choose the safe choice – the middle of the pack applicant that won’t stir up trouble. Applicants who are too opinionated or have “too much personality” are often nixed from the list of potential hires due to their unpredictability. This would be a huge mistake – often these individuals possess leadership characteristics which would enhance your workforce.

Identify Existing Skills and Areas for Potential
From your workforce, you should assess individual potential. Maybe your data entry grunt actually has skills in other areas, such as product design or technical writing. Get to know your employees, their past experiences and their interests. Often times, an unhappy employee is simply a bored one, stuck in an unchallenging and unfulfilling post. Maybe a certain employee doesn’t have outside skills, but has such a mastery of their job that they can be given the responsibility of training new hires. Or maybe they have outside skills that can be pursued in their free time – for example, search giant Google used to require that its programmers set aside 20% of their time on personal pet projects, in an effort to foster creativity. You can even rotate employees between positions to insure that everyone understands the different jobs at your company, so they can substitute each others’ jobs, if need be.

Understand if your employees are natural leaders, followers or innovators. If there are a few cogs that are getting stuck, such as irreparably disgruntled employees, these toxic employees will have to be removed from the equation to insure smooth operations.