You just spent a lot of time and money to hire the best people you can find. Now you need to help them excel at what you hired them for.

Most employees want to excel at their jobs and they look to their managers for the tools to allow them to do that. It is your job to provide those tools.

It is not enough to evaluate your troops once a year to determine their next salary level. A good manager will learn what his troops need and provide a mixture of leadership, mentorship, collaboration, encouragement, and discipline. Each employee needs differing amounts of those, so the doses need to be tailored for the individual. You don't need to be best buddies with each of your employees, but it does help to understand what drives each one and to provide an environment where problems discovered are shared instead of having fear-fostering communications with peers and managers. Understand what the goals of your employees are and help them achieve them.

True leadership is earned, not mandated. By letting your employees know what is expected of them and what the group and company priorities are, trust will follow. But you have to demonstrate you trust them as well. The quickest way to see morale plummet is to demonstrate a lack of trust in your troops. Remember, you picked them, so if you are unhappy with them, you must blame yourself, not them.

Information flow is vital. If people are starved for information, they will make up their own version of what is going on and suddenly you find you are fighting a rumor mill firestorm too large to douse. Of course there are sensitive items you can't reveal (salaries and bonuses are good examples of things you must hold back). But if you are honest about what you can say, and listen to understand issues, your are on your way to building up the trust you seek.

Part of mentoring is to teach methods to help your employees make best use of their time. I always require a very brief weekly report which lists accomplishments in the past week, planned accomplishments for the coming week, top three personal priorities, and any red flags that will or might stop progress. The main purpose of this short email report is to encourage people to plan their upcoming week. Of course it also allows early warning if progress is not being made (if the same items crop up on the "next week" list several times in a row).

-Don Burtis