Team Empowerment and Training

The team around you is the most powerful tool you have. Giving them as much situational awareness as well as additional academic training only benefits you. When everyone is informed about developments and decisions being made around them which impact their work, it helps them better do their job knowing what is coming. When you see emerging new technologies the company will be adopting, make sure your team is knowledgeable and up to date on how they work.

Give your team the courage and knowledge they need to succeed at work with company news and training on emerging technologies.

Change and Empowerment

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High level decisions are being made at your company to further its goals, which can mean changes for everyone in the company. Some of those will change what your team is focusing on. While you do not need to discuss the logistics of the reasoning, if the decisions being made impact your team, they need to know. Some examples:

• Goals change. If the team has been focusing on certain objectives which are now delayed or no longer happening, they need to know for planning purposes.

• New technologies. If there is going to be a change in technologies, the team needs to know about this to ensure they are up to date on this technology.

• Reorganizations. If there are going to be structural or organizational changes, start hinting and and talking about directions the company is going with initiatives so when its time to tell people about these changes they already understand much of the reasoning and direction.

Ensure there is an open door policy with the team. Members should feel free to voice their concerns about what is going on, and express new ideas without fear of reciprocity. Encouraging this kind of open communication and thought process should hopefully bring about good constructive feedback and new creative ideas.

Learning Culture

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Don't let anyone on your team stagnate in their careers. In the tech world you need to be in a constant state of exploration and learning to stay relevant and up to date in our jobs. Armed with the knowledge of decisions being made at the top and where the company is going, instill a culture of looking ahead for new tech to ensure everyone is knowledgeable and able to implement and support it.

Here are some areas where continuing education should be focused and reinforcing skillsets:

• New technologies the company will be adopting. Online courses from Udemy, EdX, Coursera offer free or extremely low priced options to make sure people have the skills they need now and in the future.

• Automation techniques: new applications or programming languages which allow for easy automation.

• Reviews of existing technology: to have the team gain a deeper understanding of that technology. It never hurts to take an advanced course in a topic you are well versed in to shore up that foundation and add some more techniques to your toolset.

• Knowledge sharing sessions: there will always be subject matter experts for different domains of your software in the company. Keep them sharing that knowledge to level out those skillsets across the team.

• Career goals: during one on ones with each employee follow up with them on where their career goals are. Ensure the training they are doing will align with their longer term career goals.

Keeping your employees knowledgeable about company and industry trends will help them to stay relevant in the company and also in their careers. You will likely see higher job satisfaction and people remaining in their positions longer as a result.