As a leader in the brewing industry, you are likely responsible for managing a team in completing a wide array of tasks and processes to ensure the success of your brewery. You may even recognize that certain members of your team have capabilities beyond their current functions. If your brewery is growing, and you now have a greater workload to delegate, you may be able to expand existing staff member’s roles in order to account for the additional work. The question is, how do you go about coaching your staff to stretch and take on new tasks or challenges above and beyond their current role?

Below we list the top 5 tips you can follow as a leader in the brewing industry to effectively coach your staff into taking on new challenges:

1. The power of suggestion

Sometimes your staff may not even recognize their own capabilities. It may take you noticing an employee with an untapped skill, or a broader capacity to take on more work, to stretch them further. Simply suggesting to an employee that you notice them and feel confident they can handle more, could be enough to motivate them to take on something new. This tactic is referred to as the “Pygmalion Effect.” This essentially refers to the fact that holding and communicating positive expectations about team member’s performance will actually lead to improved performance.

2. Set realistic goals

Although you want your employees to grow and challenge themselves, be sure you do not push them too far towards achieving unrealistic goals. Based on staff’s capacity and time restraints, it is important to recognize that your request may be unrealistic. If the goal you set is wildly unrealistic to achieve in the time set out and with the resources available, then you are simply setting your employee up for failure.

3. Offer support

As a busy leader, chances are you do not have significant amounts of time to coach someone through a new task that no one else has the time for. However, making this time investment in coaching your employee will pay-off in the longer term. Once your staff member is capable of handling the tasks on their own, this will free up much more time for you to focus on other projects.

4. Be positive regarding failure

Everyone fails; it is inevitable. The important thing here is to recognize that when someone is new to a task, they may not get it perfect the first time. Turn your employee’s mistakes into a learning opportunity. Stay positive and help your colleague understand where they went wrong, and what they could do differently next time. Simply reprimanding an employee when they do something wrong will only create a negative mindset and lead them to feeling as if they can’t get things right. This will demotivate them from continuing their endeavour in conquering their new challenge.

5. Focus on effort vs talent

Talent means nothing without effort. Simply praising talent will not motivate an employee to achieve. It is important to focus on praising staff for the efforts they put forth in achieving new goals and gaining new skills. Ensure your team realizes that it takes hard work to achieve, and that intelligence alone will not lead to success.

Following these five tips will ensure you successfully maximize the efforts of your existing brewery staff. Encouraging staff to achieve these new and challenging stretch goals will help them to feel more valued and engaged, and ensure you are able to achieve more as a leader with your existing human resources.

by Christine Jusczak