Cultivating future leaders within your company is crucial for a company’s success. While you may start with well-educated young professionals, guiding them toward managerial positions can be tricky and require a lot of work. Hiring good people is the first step toward creating good leaders. Giving them opportunities to showcase their leadership skills and teaching them the ropes is the second. This article contains a few tips for doing just that.
Identify Future Leaders
Team members who go above and beyond the call of duty make all the difference in a project’s success. Unfortunately, a performance review doesn’t always communicate an employee’s hard work or dedication. Create HR files for each team member to record their accomplishments and thoughts on projects, along with their soft skills, like working well with others and approaching projects with a positive attitude. These files will help identify strong leaders and make staffing decisions down the road.
Create Career Growth Opportunities
You must create employee growth opportunities to continue developing leaders within your organization. It isn’t enough to say you promote from within; you need to follow through on those promises if you want people to stick around for the long haul and grow into leadership positions.
Promoting from within is an essential aspect of business development, and it can extend the benefits of your organization. Outsourcing or assigning new hires can cause top talent to leave their positions, taking vital leadership skills with them. Of course, you need to be aware of the company’s needs, but it also is a good idea to recognize the loyal employees who have worked hard to grow into leadership roles.
Invest in Employees
Although many people have leadership potential, not everyone is a natural-born leader. When developing your team’s leadership skills, you don’t want to wait for people to fall into leadership roles naturally. You might see that some of your employees show leadership ability but aren’t ready yet.
You can bring out the best in people and cultivate their leadership skills by offering your employees ongoing training, development, mentoring, or coaching with senior leaders. In addition, investing in employee growth and development shows them you care about their success. As a result, they will be more likely to want to work toward leadership positions rather than just collect a paycheck every other week or leave for another job.
Show Your Appreciation
Training and development are essential, as are proper compensation and benefits. However, one of the most powerful things you can do for employees is to show that you appreciate them for their work. You can accomplish this through several ways, including praise, public recognition, gifts, and rewards — even something as simple as asking an employee to write a blog post can be a powerful way of showing your appreciation. Employee recognition doesn’t have to cost much, but it has the potential to reap huge dividends in terms of morale, productivity, and employee retention.
As you work to develop leaders in your organization, it might help to consult with the experts at Maximum Accountability to be sure you’re on the right track. Reach out to us to start the process.