Regardless of how often you actually ask for it, as a business owner, you know we should be collecting regular feedback from our clients and customers to help improve the quality of your products and services, iron out kinks in your processes, and deliver a better experience in the future.

The same is true for your team.

No matter if you have a small team of in-house employees or a large number of remote contractors who don’t know of or interact with each other, it’s essential that you regularly collect feedback from them on how you’re performing both individually as their boss, and collectively as a company.

It’s easy as the leader of your companies to think operations as smoother than they really are to the people in the trenches carrying out the various tasks.

And what about your leadership and organizational skills?

If you’re like many business owners, you saw success early because of your strategy, insight and work ethic, and were forced to bring on other people as new clients kept coming in.

Many new bosses don’t realize that the skills that really matter for running a business are more than strategic thinking and the ability to execute.

Great bosses have the ability to communicate the goals, strategies, and processes to their teams, motivate them to be as committed to achieving the end result as you are, and empathize with where each person on your team is at and know what they need to be and become their best selves through their work.

You might think you have all these skills already mastered. Most entrepreneurs accustomed to success do.

But polling your team regularly and intentionally seeking out areas in which you can improve will highlight any glaring gaps in your skillset.

I got feedback early on from my team that I didn’t share praise or criticism often enough and my team members often had no clue if their work was meeting expectations. Since getting that feedback I’ve made a concerted effort to share praise, gratitude and constructive feedback more freely.

It’s easy to push digging into and improving our team culture onto the back burner. It doesn’t feel like time spent in that arena is as valuable as time spent working on getting new clients, honing our marketing, or actually doing the work.

But in the long term, a smoothly functioning team gets more done faster and at a higher quality level than one where you’re personally having to go back and make revisions, put out fires, and calm down upset customers.

Also, it’s just less stressful, and that in itself is worth the effort.

What have you learned from your team about skills you need to improve? Lemme know in the comments!

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