Power of Encouragement Revisited

Recently I wrote about the power of encouragement including a story from my point of view.  That was a very good post so I have provided a link back to it here.  If you have not read it, please take a quick moment to do so.  Today I will expand on this idea while adding in a new story about a recent hire at the store where I am a manager. 

Recently our store hired a new employee who would be working as a part of my team.  While I was not involved in the interview process I was consulted in the decision making process.  This new hire was my first trainee as a manager, which is a task I thoroughly looked forward to.  Throughout the training process, one thing stuck in the back of my head and it was the recent situation I told you about in my previous post.  With this in mind, I was constantly encouraging my new team member through both mistakes and breakthroughs.  This investment quickly paid off, as my team member quickly became one of the highest performers in terms of basic task performance or daily responsibilities, which represented the bulk of the training.  With more training and more experience on the job, I truly believe a recent hire can turn into a top performer on a team full of top performers. 

One you might be pondering is how much does this encouragement really do for the performance of the team.  Well every person has a point where if their efforts are not noticed they stop working as hard.  By simply noticing employees doing a job well you can work to avoid this loss of production.  Whether you are a manager or not take a moment to recognize the hard work of someone you work with tomorrow and just see what comes from that.  Do that every day and the culture of your workplace may change because of you.