[November 3, 2018] You can’t be present in the office 24/7. From day one, you will have some business trips, health issues or holidays take you away. So who will be in charge while you’re away? Team leadership is what you have to focus on to have a pair of reliable hands.
Learn how to develop leadership skills, motivate and encourage your successful team of workers to become better day by day.
Get to Know Who Is Who
Leadership is a highly dynamic relationship between an individual and other members of a group. Not every person is skilled enough to go beyond his regular duties and take on more responsibilities. You have to identify who is a potential leader: how they deal with work, communicate with customers, work in a team. The leader sets the goals and supervises the work closely. Participate in workplace conversations to notice who stands out.
Get Down to Business
Let your employees prove themselves as leaders. Invite to accompany you on a business trip, give extra tasks or challenge them to rectify an unexpected situation. Give them a chance to be problem-solvers. Start with small tasks that will be out of their comfort zone.
“Sometimes, we invite a couple of employees to preside over the business meetup that our company arranges once a year. Last time we had a stressful situation arisen, and I found our colleagues to be very organized. Now I know who will never scurry away once something unpleasant happens.” – says Roy Colbert, an HR manager at Skillroads.
Nevertheless, keep your employees in check. An effective leader always guides others.
Provide Motivational Examples
Promote from within! Leaders create leaders – nothing motivates more than a living proof of chances to get promoted. Xerox CEO Ursula Burns and the CEO of Rosetta Stone Tom Adams started out as the interns. Isn’t it inspiring? In addition, by creating leaders, you make your business grow. According to Global Leadership Forecast 2018, only 14% of CEOs have the talent they need to execute their business strategies.
Provide Learning Opportunities
Provide your workers with job training or let eLearning overcome the workplace skills gap. Training makes workers satisfied with workplace cultivating leadership skills at the same time. Statistics say 40% of employees with poor training opportunities leave the job within the first year. Invest in your employees using one of these most spread forms of training:
- Observation Learning
- Soft Skills Development
- Professional Training
Leave Your Honest Feedback
Don’t be afraid to praise and criticize your workers. Good leaders appreciate any feedback. Your honest and objective reaction will let them develop decision-making skills. Especially, when they need to reconsider already completed work. Give your recommendations, set a personal meeting with you if possible.
Don’t Do More than Needed
Do your part and step aside. Yes, you’re interested in the growth of your employees. You want them to move up the career ladder and become professionals. However, there’s nothing you can do if a worker doesn’t want to become a leader. Growing ambitions and skills, a person must have both external and internal motivation. Leadership boards, game-like competitions might nudge an employee in the right direction, but it mostly depends on individual willingness.
Use any of those 6 strategies to notch up team successes and develop leadership in your company.
Learning how to accept honest feedback is also valuable for the junior leader but I find they often are too personally insulted to take it well. The newer and younger the leader, the less well they take feedback. ?
I agree with you Willie. As regular readers of Gen. Satterfield’s leadership blog, we see this all the time. Thanks for bringing it up again and pointing out how young leaders need better mentorship.
Ms Berg, well done! I think you’ve done a good job of pointing how to improve leadership in teams. It is always good to read a different perspective on the “nurturing” of team leaders. Thanks.
🙂
Thanks, Mr Heyman, for your kind words! Happy you liked my article and find it useful.
Team leaders are usually junior leaders and yet they often get little in the way of either mentoring or instruction on how to lead. So many are just left to do their jobs and the senior leaders are observing who is the ‘best’ among them all. That is why leadership training and experience BEFORE you get a job is best.
Good point, Darryl.
Good article. I enjoyed reading it.
Getting to know your people is key, I think and you seem to also acknowledge it’s importance. I believe that the biggest problem with leadership is that the leader doesn’t take the time and effort to get to know their people and thus are not using them as effectively as they should. Good read this morning. Thanks Alice.
Thank you, Danny. I believe personal approach helps to build a strong team and increase loyalty to the company overall. So it’s important not to forget you’re working with people, not with the machines. By knowing your workers’ desires (both connected with professional and personal growth and interests) would play a big part in further team/company development.
I like the idea that a good team leader provides learning opportunities. Although often written about, I find that many organizations fail to provide those opportunities despite them talking about the necessity of such training. Thanks for a really good article.
Yes, this was indeed a pointed blog post on team leadership. Superb!
Yes, excellent article.
Very informative, Ms Berg. Thanks for a new look at team leadership.
My pleasure!