Christian Trade News Australia

As 2010 quickly approaches, it is important that we don’t get caught up in spending all of our time working ‘in our businesses’ but allocating time to work ‘on our businesses’.  The beginning of 2010 presents us with fresh opportunities to improve our stores and various organisations.  As such, one of the most challenging tasks of any manager is dealing with staff and volunteers.  Below is an excerpt from a recent article by Tony Gattari, formerly the General Manager of the computers and communications division of Harvery Norman.

IN MY EXPERIENCE advising businesses, I’ve seen many retail owners and managers struggle with giving honest constructive feedback to their employees. Let me clarify that… they struggle giving honest constructive feedback to poor performing employees. Why? we sometimes confuse providing clear, constructive performance feedback with personal judgment.
Another way of looking at this, is that if you don’t tell staff how they’re performing, you’re hurting the person’s and the company’s performance potential. Many people want to learn and grow, and without performance feedback, poor performance will remain, like a virus. Imagine if your company went under because of incompetence. How would you feel later if you knew you’d had the opportunity to improve performance but had avoided simply telling the truth?

Reviewing employee performance isn’t just reviewing the amount of fruit staff have in their baskets. You can have an employee who hits all their numbers but if they lied, cheated and stole their way to get there, they’re not supporting the values of your company and they’re not worth keeping. In any organisation the team comes before the individual. Values are designed to give your business a conscience on every decision that’s made, and to ignore that conscience is to rip the soul out of your organisation  For the full article, or other insightful topics, please visit www.achieversgroup.com.au.

Dealing with challenges in your staff and/or volunteer teams is never easy.  It requires a lot of prayer, wisdom and courage (action while yet still afraid).  People follow and take on challenges presented by consistent, open and inspiring leadership (your leadership).  If you have any success stories, challenges or questions relating to this topic, post them as a comment – maybe we can help each other improve in this area, and so see our represented organisations and industry be strengthened because of it.