Building a great credit team can be a challenging and long process. It can take months, if not years to put together the right team. You need to consider everyone’s skills, how they work together, and countless other factors. Even with the perfect team though, you may not be getting the results you want. Here are some ways that you can energize your credit team in order to maximize their results.
Empower them to Make Decisions
There is no point building a smart and well-rounded credit team if you do not trust them to make decisions for themselves. This is not to say they should not have oversight, but allowing them to take charge and have freedom can lead to strategies you never thought of. It also allows them to gain self-confidence and motivation that could lead them to take more pride in their work and increase the likelihood that they will want to improve their skills.
Keep an Open Dialogue
This goes hand and hand with the previous point. Instead of constantly monitoring them and watching over them, empower them to make their own calls and encourage an open discussion between you and them when they have questions. This allows you to maintain a level of oversight, but still give you team the impression that they have some freedom. You should still make sure that they understand who is the boss and keep a professional tone to the conversations, but if done right it can foster new ideas and help your bottom line.
Set Clear Goals
With all this freedom, it can be hard to hold people accountable. This is why it is important to set clear goals for your team. They should know exactly what you expect from them and you should hold them accountable when they do not achieve this.
Encourage then to plan ahead
Nothing is worse than wasting time repeating tasks or not having everything ready when you need it. It can cripple even the best and most talented teams. We often recommend that you get your team to spend the last 10-20 minutes before they go home getting everything ready for the next day. This could mean writing notes of what they need to get done or getting documents ready for tomorrow. It can even be as simple as just cleaning up their desk and organizing anything they have laying out.
Creating a great and talented team is great, but you can not be afraid to let them do their job. Finding the right balance of structure and freedom is one of the biggest keys to running a productive and thriving credit department.