Teamwork is a very important principle of business development for the entrepreneur. When your ideas are right, finance is solid, and the energy to pursue the dream is high you will still need people to contribute in building the business. Building your business with a team is key to every entrepreneur who is looking to take his business to the next level. And as Frederick Amissah, country manager for Herbalife Ghana Ltd will put it, “For me my team is my life.”
Fred believes to get the best out of teams one needs to involve them from the ideas conceptualization stage through to delivery. Visions and plans are good and every business needs one. But to achieve the kind of feat that Fred Amissah has chalked with the team he leads at Herbalife Ghana Ltd, one needs effective teamwork, to plan, and, put all the strategic and operational support systems in place. Every team member is ascribed a role with clearly defined expectations to enable them deliver on those visions and plans.
Peer reviewing is one key factor in developing teams. You allow people to benchmark activities with peers in the group to see where they are falling short and can pick. Which areas are seeing the business strengths and can maximize on that in other areas for the vision of the business to be actualized. Every team member reviews any member of the team and good appraisals are done to achieve maximum results for the business. In all of these good feedback is also garnered which goes into the overall strategic plan of the business.
Fred also talks about skipping level- ; “when I talk about skipping level its going down to the least person in the organization because most often they have the brilliant ideas because they see the ins-and-out of what is going on in the organization that the leader might not be aware of.” Skipping level and asking through the organization what can be done right and what is being done right really help bring very innovative ideas to build future successes and that is how Fred drives and leads my teams.
And one key thing also is celebration of success; once you give people the freedom to succeed and successes come, you celebrate them and it’s very important that you recognize people for their efforts. People stay very positive and are willing to die for a course when their successes are being recognized and celebrated. It’s now a common feature to walk into many banking halls and see photo displays of staff adjudged stars of the month for the contribution to business growth in that particular branch. It also comes with some perks for the staffs that are adjudged stars of the month. Morale is boosted and the business gains in the long haul.
Take your teams serious. They are your internal customers who will in turn bring the desired external customers to make the company stay in business.
Author: Paa Swanzy-Essuman || p.swanzy@ghanatalksbusiness.com