Makarios Consulting Blog

6 Holiday Gifts for Your Team

With the holidays right around the corner, here are six gifts ideas that you as a leader can give your team! Follow the links for more information on each gift:

1. Give reinforcing feedback to your team members who are doing a great job

Everyone loves the gift of reinforcing feedback! Not just individuals who are under-performing, but all-star performers, outside vendors, and everyone in between. Anyone with whom we interact in the course of the workday can benefit from reinforcing feedback. Even the most consistent performers need us to recognize and affirm their performances.

2. Give redirecting feedback to your team members who have areas of improvement

No one likes to hear what they’re doing wrong. And, as leaders, we often don’t want to tell employees ‘bad news’ about their progress or attitude. But ‘redirecting feedback,’ which seeks to change, or redirect, the recipient’s undesired behavior, can be a positive and empowering gift for both the giver and receiver!

3. Give new team members a great onboarding experience

You’ve recruited, interviewed, and evaluated top candidates for your open position. Now, that empty gap on your team is finally filled! With a huge sigh of relief, you wipe your hands of the whole complicated hiring process and get back to your real work. Right? Wrong! If you want that new hire you spent so much time and effort finding to be a success, you’d better give them the gift of outstanding onboarding.

4. Give VOMP to any team members who are in conflict

It is never pleasant when things get heated between team members – but the VOMP conflict resolution model, created by Crosby Kerr Minno Consulting, is a proven method to help ease tension and release new energy and creativity into your business by helping all parties seek mutually-beneficial solutions.

5. Give your entire team the gift of issue resolution

If there are unresolved tough issues that you and your team have been avoiding, give everyone the gift of tackling and resolving those issues – now. With the issues addressed, you will be able to move toward optimal productivity, performance, and outcomes.

And since you are a key member of your team, here is one more gift …

6. Give YOURSELF the gift of making your priorities a priority

As a leader in business, you have countless tasks, calls, meetings, reports, and responsibilities clamoring for your attention. If you keep them all on your schedule and try to prioritize them, you will make some headway but you will never get everything done. Learn how to get off the hamster wheel by taking the advice of Stephen Covey, author of the best-selling leadership book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: “The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”

Happy holidays from the Makarios team!