Any business that has plenty of people within it with great leadership qualities is going in the right direction to find success. Leadership qualities are rare to find in a member of staff and unless you have hired someone who is a natural born leader then the responsibility will be on your shoulders to upscale your workforce, seek out the potential leaders and give them the correct training and support that they need in order to boost their leadership skills.
Haris Ahmed is a business leadership expert and he regularly works with a wide range of companies and enterprises throughout the United States to help improve their levels of leadership within the business. We picked his brains to find out what his thoughts were on how you can improve leadership attributes amongst your staff.
Talent Spotting
The first place to start is to take a deep look at the workforce and ascertain who you think would benefit from leadership skills and also who has what it takes to step up to this level. It doesn’t matter how good the training is, if someone does not have the drive, desire or natural competence to adapt to these new skills then it will be a waste of your time to try and upskill them. Look around you and try to pick out the people who seem to step up to the plate when given responsibility, who looks as though they are hungry for more and who has already gained the trust and the command of their colleagues. These are the people that you should highlight for training.
On The Job
There are many ways to teach leadership on paper but the best way for people to learn is to actively do leadership style tasks. You don’t need to promote anyone or anything such as that, just hand out more responsibilities to those who you think could benefit from them. Once you have done this, you need to set up a regular appraisal meeting. It is in these meetings that you can not only assess how well the member of staff is getting on with their responsibility but also where you can impart leadership knowledge to them. You can spot someone’s leadership potential in the simplest of ways by giving them additional responsibility and seeing how they adapt to it.
Use Workshops
Workshops may be an expensive way for you to train your staff but it means that you can do so without taking any time away from your job. This also means that those who you think are ready for the next stage can receive some professional training from people who are dedicated to showing people how to become leaders. You will of course be able to hone their talents once they return from the course but the initial work will have been done for you and to a high standard.