As a manager or a team lead somewhere on the higher end of the food chain, the choice to build leadership skills is a decision you’re not likely to regret. In fact, empowered and more self-aware individuals – likely consequences of good leadership training – are a testament to your own skills and values as a leader.
While you may have an idea about what kind of skills you’d like to inculcate among your teams, getting down to actually building these out is a more complex matter. Do you have any strategies in place?
With 77% of organizations reporting that they’re currently experiencing a leadership gap, our post dives into a few strategies you can test out to successfully build leadership skills in your workforce!
They often say that your network = net worth. Cheesy quotes (and equations) aside, giving your employees space to engage with each other in a meaningful way is crucial if you want to build leadership skills among them.
When they become better at it, they’ll be encouraged to branch out and connect with other professionals in your industry, forging useful connections, both, for themselves and for the company.
Apart from organizing company events, whether formal or informal, and allowing your employees to interact with each other, make sure each of them is taken for external events and other industry get-togethers whenever possible. This will expose them to environments in which they need to ooze charm, gravitas and professionalism in equal measure.
Another undoubtedly useful way to build leadership skills is to organize leadership training programs.
Yet, while you may find a plethora of options before you – given the popularity of these kinds of training – straying of the beaten track and opting for training programs that are uniquely personalized to specific sets of personalities is taking things to the next level.
This, however, comes with a caveat; you need to understand exactly who you’re team members or employees are. Fortunately, workplace psychometric tests, particularly those that identify an individual’s personality according to their behaviors and attitudes in the workplace, can do exactly that.
Using the results of these tests, you can segment employees with similar personalities together and provide them with leadership content that’s relevant to their existing skills and attitudes. While this may involve more cost and effort compared to the traditional route, you can guarantee that this type of training is likely to be far more effective.
If you’re trying to build leadership skills within your employees, one of the most crucial things you need to do is show them what it means to be a true leader.
Your employees will have their eyes on you most. While you can’t fulfil every expectation, you need to embody meaningful values. Here, being driven, motivated, compassionate, fair and objective are some of the basic skills you need to develop within yourself, first.
When you’re a source of inspiration and motivation, your team will want to emulate the qualities of a leader, even unconsciously.
One piece of advice we faithfully dole out, here at Wired2Perform, is the need to provide your employees with feedback in a consistent and meaningful manner.
By doing so, you guide your employees along a path that improves their existing skills and builds on entirely new abilities. You can also use these sessions to discuss long-term leadership building strategies and work closely with them to help them reach their fullest potential.
Despite the massive benefits these sessions come with, however, only a mere 2% of employers provide ongoing feedback to employees according to a survey on HR professionals by the Society for Human Resource Management.
Leadership skills are all-important in the modern battlefield that’s the workplace. With new trends, innovations, and challenges completely transforming the way we work, being able to make good decisions and having the right business and interpersonal instincts can go a long way.
Knowing how to be a true leader is crucial in this process.
